Poppet (4 page)

Her suite is in the attic – a feature wall papered in bronze-and-black repeat patterns, low comfortable leather chairs and everywhere the painted cast-iron pillars that remain from the time this was a sugar warehouse. Her room looks out over the city centre – at eye level St John the Baptist church, lit up at night, rises into the sky.

Jacqui immediately pours herself a vodka and orange from the minibar. When she goes into the bathroom Caffery empties the drink out of the window and fills it with orange juice. He sets it on the bedstand, then stands at the open window. It is freezing out there – he can hear the tinkling laughter of drinkers coming and going from the bars down in the streets.

He’s been in this part of the country for over three years, and is slowly getting to learn the geography of Bristol as well as he knew the geography of his native South London. He knows all the bars and the crimes that have taken place at street level – can scroll back through the pub brawls and the murders. The barmaid in a place a few hundred metres away, stabbed to death eight years ago by the customer who waited until the place emptied so he could be alone with his victim. A fight that ended with an eighteen-year-old having his face slashed a few metres further down the road. A takeaway next door to that, busted one day nineteen months ago for serving not just kebabs but also crack cocaine and ketamine.

It is Caffery’s job to ferret out the secrets hidden under the veneer. His unit – MCIT – is the one that gets all the murders and difficult cases. The cases that need high-level attention. Like the one that’s making Jacqui so angry.

The toilet flushes and she comes out again. She ignores the drink and throws herself on to the bed, face down.

‘You OK?’

She nods into the pillow. ‘I took a sleeping pill.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘It’s the only idea.’

Caffery checks his watch. It means he’s going to have to wait with her – make sure she doesn’t throw up and choke herself. Or go into a coma. He glances around the room. There’s a plush brown sofa with gold scatter cushions he can rest on. He draws the quilt over Jacqui then goes into the bathroom. Puts the plug in the basin and turns the taps on. While the sink fills he hunts through the various pill packets she has scattered around. There are no prescription drugs, just over-the-counter things – stomach-acid tablets and paracetamol and some slimming aids. Also a packet of Nytol, which he opens. One has been removed from the blister pack. He checks the bin and there are no empty pill packets. She hasn’t overdosed then.

He hunts through all the designer toiletries – finds a shower gel which he squirts into the sink until he can make a lather. Then he pulls off his shirt and drops it in the sink. He rubs the soap into it, scrubbing at the collar where the wine has soaked in. He rinses it, then hangs it over the huge rain-shower head.

He goes back into the bedroom, drying his hands on a towel. Jacqui is exactly where he left her, on her front, her arms wide apart, her face turned to one side. He stands alongside her, head tilted, waiting and listening. Her eyes are closed and there’s already a faint snoring noise.

He sits on a low animal-hide chair and surveys the room. There’s a TV but he’d wake her up. A couple of magazines. He leafs through them – nothing much to see. An article about a designer hotel on the outskirts of Bristol that holds his attention for a moment, because he was at the same hotel this lunchtime – attending the killer-boring Criminal Justice Forum. He recognizes the downlit beaten-copper sinks in the gents, the sweeping poured-concrete reception desk. He spent a few minutes at that reception desk, with a pretty, very professional woman – a blonde, who had some top-drawer position in a local health trust – talking shop, all the while his primitive brain conjecturing in a vague, theoretical way whether or not he could get her into bed. She was the only interesting thing about the event. Otherwise it was eminently forgettable.

He tries to read a little longer, but can’t concentrate. He drops the magazine and looks around the room again. There is a lavish hand-tied bunch of flowers shoved into an ice bucket on the drinks table. Caffery gets up, goes to the flowers, and reads the card. It’s from the newspaper Jacqui is supposed to be giving an interview to. Misty, her twenty-five-year-old model daughter, walked out of a rehab clinic on the Wiltshire border a year and a half ago. She was a drug addict and having relationship problems with her footballer boyfriend, but neither of those things was sufficient to explain why she was never seen again. Every avenue has been searched over and over – and there are still no clues. She was simply there one day, not the next. Thousands of people go missing each year and if they’re ordinary, adult and competent, the police time spent on them is embarrassingly little. But Misty was a celebrity of sorts; young, pretty. The media has kept the interest going long after police would normally have given up. Jacqui Kitson has been a regular face in the tabloids – pictures of Jacqui in the last place Misty was seen, on the sweeping white steps of the clinic, gazing pensively up at the building where her daughter spent her final days. Posing with a photo of Misty and a handkerchief clutched to her face. She dishes every insult about police incompetence she can muster.

Each of her words is a knife in Caffery’s side. He is the Senior Investigating Officer tasked with finding Misty and the case has been haunting him for ages – it has been bounced back and forward between MCIT and the review team until Misty’s name has burned a hole through his head. But truth is stranger than fiction and the world is never what it seems: for over a year Caffery’s been hopscotching over the issue, he’s been guarding the case like a hound, appearing to be working on it while simultaneously leading the unit away from what he really knows about Misty’s disappearance – which is more,
much
more, than any cop has a right. It’s a big fat secret he’s been hiding. Something he can’t do anything about.

He replaces the card gently amongst the gaudy blooms. Can’t? Or won’t? Or is he just not quite ready? There’s one more bridge to cross, the one he’s been avoiding for months.

‘I know,’ Jacqui says suddenly from the bed. ‘I do know.’

Caffery thought she was asleep. He approaches slowly. She doesn’t open her eyes, but nods, as if to acknowledge him. She hasn’t moved, her eyes are closed, her voice muffled.

‘I do know.’

‘Know what, Jacqui? What do you know?’

‘I know she’s dead.’

That Misty is still alive hasn’t realistically crossed the mind of any of the officers on the case – not for months and months. It shakes Caffery a little to realize that it’s taken time and work for Jacqui to come to the same conclusion.

‘And I’m OK with it,’ she continues, her eyes still closed, only her mouth working. ‘I am OK with her being dead. There’s just one thing I need.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I just need her body back. You don’t know what it’s like, not to have a body to bury. It’s all I want.’

The Maude

LEGEND HAS IT
that Maude is the ghost of a matron from when Beechway High Secure Unit was a workhouse, back in the 1860s. Born a dwarf, she’d risen to a position of authority in the workhouse through sheer determination and single-mindedness. It was a position she abused. It is said that children who misbehaved would be subjected to Sister Maude straddling their chests, spooning ‘medicine’ into their mouths until they choked. That she would make the children write out biblical texts – line after line until their fingers bled. Some versions of the myth say Sister Maude had something under her robes she kept private: that she wasn’t really a ‘sister’ at all but actually a male dwarf dressed as a female.

Four and a half years ago, just before AJ first came to work on the unit, an anorexic patient named Pauline Scott had convinced herself something was coming into her room at night. She claimed it would sit on her chest, would try to suffocate her. She’d showed the doctor where her thighs had been slashed. The words
Be thou not one of them that committeth foul acts
had been gouged into her leg. Two unfolded and bloodied paper clips had been found in Pauline’s bin – which she denied all knowledge of. No one much liked Pauline, they thought the engraving on her legs was apt. She’d been returned to Acute Assessment, where they’d monitored her for three weeks.

When AJ arrived, shortly after the incident, it was all the staff could talk about. At night in the nurses’ station there’d be whispers and jokes, people trying to spook each other hiding in dark doorways. A few took it seriously – an agency nurse on a midnight shift swore she heard the scratches of fingernails on a windowpane and refused ever to set foot inside the unit again. One of the more highly strung social workers claimed she’d once looked out of a window and seen a dwarf sitting on the lawn, wearing a white Victorian gown. The dwarf was doing nothing. Just watching the unit. Its face was smooth and shining in the moonlight.

AJ was one of those who found it little more than entertaining – a bit of a diversion. Then The Maude paid another visit. And this time it wiped the smile off everyone’s face.

Moses Jackson was a long-stay patient – a grizzled grey guy with thin limbs and a nasty attitude. A downright, whole-enchilada, nasty little shit. He was vicious and deceitful and rude. He would call the female staff ‘Splits’ and was always pulling down his pants to show them his penis. Female staff couldn’t be alone with him, which complicated his care and made him even more time-consuming. Of course if any of this was pointed out to Moses he’d scream racism and demand that the Trust’s top brass came and met him to explain what they were going to do about it.

AJ was still a nurse in those days. He’d arrived for the early shift that morning to find the place in chaos: nurses were rushing around from ward to ward, grabbing notes, grabbing phones, council workers traipsed in and out carrying toolkits, and an unearthly screaming was coming from Buttercup Ward. The allocated ‘Control and Restraint’ nurses were in another ward – so eventually, when AJ couldn’t stand the noise any more, he decided to go and attend to it himself. Moses was standing in the middle of his room. He was stripped naked from the waist down, and was hugging himself and crying – staring at the walls. Every inch had been scribbled on in red felt-tip. Hundreds and hundreds of words – on the walls, the skirting boards, even the ceiling.

AJ had seen the worst and the weirdest in various institutions before Beechway, but this was a different level of bizarre. He was silent for a moment, gawping at the sheer extent of the damage.

‘Moses.’ He shook his head, half wanting to laugh, half to cry. ‘Moses, mate, what did you do this for?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Have the doctors changed your meds?’ AJ studied Moses carefully. He couldn’t recall seeing a note in the care file – usually the nursing staff were given clear instructions if anything changed. Especially with medication. ‘Did you have something different last night? Yesterday?’

‘I didn’t do it!’

‘OK,’ AJ said patiently. The room smelled, the vaguest undertone of something like burning fish, so he cracked one of the window vents. He glanced down at the old guy’s genitalia, which dangled in front of his scrawny, grey-haired legs. ‘How about putting your drawers back on, mate? The doctors will need to check you over – you don’t want them seeing all your man stuff hanging out.’

‘I never took them off.’

‘Well, how about you just put them on anyway?’ He handed over the pyjama bottoms. ‘There you go.’

While Moses was putting them on, AJ wandered around the room, his head canted on one side, reading the words:

Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart
.

On other sections:
If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away
.

The lines were repeated dozens and dozens of times. They’d have to be scrubbed out, or painted over.

‘Moses,’ AJ said calmly, not drawing attention to the writing, ‘shall we go to breakfast?’ There was nothing in AJ’s long experience of psychiatric nursing more effective at changing the subject or distracting a patient than the mention of food. ‘They’re doing waffles and syrup for dessert.’

Moses went along willingly to the dining room, though he had the appearance of someone moving further and further away from reality. The drugs, which he usually tolerated with few side effects, seemed to have started to work against him. There was a wet patch on his trousers and lines of drool hung like pendulous beads of pearls from his mouth. The other patients gave him a wide berth. He was withdrawn, standing quietly in the queue, one fist jammed into his right eye socket, which he kept rubbing at like crazy.

Isaac Handel, a runty long-stay patient with a pudding-basin haircut, was the first to notice when things crossed over into the serious.

‘Hey,’ he said to one of the nurses. ‘Look, look.’

The nurses looked. Moses had separated from the queue and turned his back on the room. He was bending slightly at the waist, head down, and seemed to be struggling with his face. AJ was slow off the mark. Instead of responding instantly, he meandered across the dining room, a half-smile on his face – more curious about what Moses was doing than anxious.

‘Moses, mate? You all right there?’

‘A spoon,’ Handel said. ‘He’s got a spoon.’

The patients were allowed spoons on the pre-discharge wards. It had never been seen as a danger or a threat. AJ approached Moses from behind. He was about to put a reassuring hand on his back when he noticed something dangling from the guy’s jaw. Or rather, not dangling but dripping. It was blood and it was coming in such a steady stream he’d mistaken it for a cord hanging there.

‘C and R!’ he yelled, automatically tugging out the ring on his panic alarm. ‘C and R, dining area. Paramedics.’ Three other nurses came running, trying to grab Moses and get him on to the ground to the supine position. But he had the strength of ten men. He wrenched away from AJ and continued struggling with whatever it was he was doing to his face.