Poppet (6 page)

She doesn’t react, merely carries on snoring. He sits up, aching from a night on the cramped sofa, ties the hotel robe he’s slept in. He can see the headlines if he gets up undressed:
Missing Misty: Senior Detective Gropes Mum in Sleazy Hotel Romp
.

He crosses to the bed and watches Jacqui – monitoring her breathing. She’s going to live. He pads into the bathroom. He showers, makes coffee, tries to shave with the hotel razor, cuts himself and has to use Jacqui’s perfume to seal the wound. His shirt is just about wearable, a little creased and damp on the collar. He checks his reflection. He looks, frankly, like someone who has spent the night on a sofa. Smells as bad too. As he leaves, he books an alarm call for nine in case Jacqui sleeps through, then he slips out – closing the door silently. Outside, the streets are quiet. A bus appears – a moving light cube of empty seats, two middle-aged women in the back, both fast asleep, their heads jiggling gently with the movement. He waits for it to pass then crosses the road to the White Lion, where beer crates are piled in the doorway. The high, sweet stench of alcohol, honey and acid reminds him he didn’t drink last night. The first time in months. It must be that holier-than-thou thing kicking in. Seeing Jacqui so wasted. Feeling righteous drinking Badoit.

There’s a grille in the pavement which most people don’t realize leads to an underground river that flows endlessly beneath the streets. He imagines the long swish of water under there – what it carries in it. He knows because he’s seen. Broken plastic chairs, dead cats, crisp packets, floating cans. They all fetch up a few hundred metres on, in the teeth of the grille that lets out into the harbour. Like a great baleen whale – holding back the filth. The things that are hidden. The things we walk over. Under. Past. Every single day of our lives, and never notice. A hundred places a body could be hidden for ever.

He could tell Jacqui Kitson exactly where her daughter Misty is. He could and he hasn’t. Because he’s protecting someone. Someone who needs a little slack. A
little
slack, he tells himself. As opposed to a lifetime of leniency. Does thinking this mean it’s time to act? To cross the bridge he’s been avoiding?

He pulls out a V-Cig, clicks the cartridge, and sucks in the fake smoke. He takes it out of his mouth and inspects the thing. Shit. It’s really shit. It still makes him feel he’s being poisoned. He uncaps the cartridge and drops it through the grille. Feed the whale.

No point in driving home – he’ll go straight to work. He turns in the direction of the place his car is parked. Over the roofs daytime is bleeding in – thick and milky. Another day. The church is lit by floodlights, one or two dead leaves are whipped in a spiral around the steeple. He stops in his tracks. Turns slowly to look through the gate into the graveyard. He can see waste baskets and dog-shit bins and chewing gum spotting the path. He can see plastic flowers on graves, all grimed from the city fumes. Two marble-sided graves with those glassy green pebbles they all seem to use. Beyond them is a Victorian grave – an angel praying on it – mossed and crumbling.

Jacqui says Caffery has no idea what it’s like not to have a body to bury. That’s where she’s wrong. He knows exactly what it’s like. In fact he’s a past master. When Winnie Johnson, mother of the missing Moors victim, died not knowing where her son was buried, Caffery took the day off work and sat in his kitchen, staring out of the window. He’s lived in the same hole as her and Jacqui for years. And years.

In Caffery’s case it isn’t a son or a daughter – it’s a brother. Maybe that’s why he keeps it so close to his chest. The rest of the world understands that the loss of a child can never be overcome, but the loss of a brother? After thirty-five years? He should have got over it by now. There have been plenty of clues, plenty of avenues he’s nosed up, but none of them has led him to that tangible evidence – the body. Maybe if he had a body to bury he’d get rid of that itch. That constant, plaguing voice. He understands Jacqui so much better than she knows.

He stares at the angel. For a reason he can’t define he knows it’s the grave of a child. He half raises his hand to open the gate, then stops himself. He stands, stock-still, his heart thudding.

Cross that bridge, Jack. Just fucking do it.

Patience and Stewart

USUALLY WHEN AJ
leaves the unit he can forget about the place. Not today. Today as he drives home, through the drizzle and morning rush-hour traffic, he keeps going back there in his head. Keeps seeing that smooth face from the nightmare, the constriction in his chest. Keeps re-enacting the later conversation with Melanie.

He wonders, not for the first time, what Zelda Lornton’s postmortem report is going to say. Any death in the unit has, by law, to be investigated by the police and an external review team. The superintendent who took the job admits there’s been a bit of a fire in the coroner’s office over who’s going to do the autopsy. Zelda’s death didn’t strike the coroner as being odd enough to warrant an expensive full-scale post-mortem by a Home Office pathologist, but the ordinary hospital doctors have been reluctant to take on the responsibility of cutting open a patient who has died unexpectedly on a psychiatric unit. The examination has been a hot potato that bounced around the Flax Bourton mortuary like a ping-pong ball until someone put their foot down and insisted one of the pathologists did it as a coroner’s ‘special’ post-mortem – something, apparently, halfway between an ordinary PM and a forensic PM. That was three days ago and they’re still waiting to hear.

Maybe the coroner is right. Zelda was young, but she was very overweight – over twenty stone – and inactive. Considered from that perspective, she was an unsurprising candidate. Enormously lazy, she was pushed everywhere in a wheelchair though she was quite capable of walking. Her clothing strained at the seams and the staff had to rub Vaseline into the folds on her legs to stop her getting sores. Her clothes consisted of seven red T-shirts and seven grey pairs of joggers and seven pairs of red socks. She would wear nothing else, even when she began to outgrow them and they’d been stitched so often they were more darning thread than fabric. Anything beyond eating and watching television was an abuse of Zelda’s rights. She was a habitual blamer of the system; the staff lost track of the times they were accused of abusing/molesting/raping her. No one argued with her, though many would have liked to. She could tip the mood of the entire ward on its head – everyone responded to her. Everyone walked on a knife-edge.

AJ cannot, will not, ever pretend he liked Zelda. But as he gets to the end of the narrow country lane where he lives, he finds he can’t get rid of the image of her that night with her arms bloodied. All the rebellion taken out of her. And the words, ‘Someone … some
thing
.’

He pulls on the handbrake and switches off the engine. Lets the silence leak in. There’s not much to look at here – only the spread of the Severn flood plain, Berkeley Castle, the glorious view of the decommissioned nuclear-power station to admire at sunset. No neighbours, just the cows. This is Eden Hole Cottages – the place he was raised – right out in the middle of nowhere. Brought up by his mother, Dolly Jessie LeGrande, and his aunt Patience Belle LeGrande – two sassy half-Jamaican women from Bristol. Mum has been dead three years, but Aunt Patience is still going strong. Stronger and stronger.

‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ Patience yells from the front room as he lets himself in. ‘
Daybreak
’s finished – it’s nearly time for damned
Cash in the
goddamned
Attic
.’

Aunt Patience is so badly named. She yells at everyone, slams the phone down at the merest provocation and doesn’t believe in queues. She’s an irascible, tetchy, eccentric force of nature – she exudes the gravity of a planet; everything falls into her orbit. When she is in a bad mood objects fall off shelves and strangers’ babies cry; when she’s happy it’s like the sun has come out. People smile, couples kiss, and arguments cease. Some days he’d happily throttle Aunt Patience – put a pillow on her face and suffocate her. Put arsenic in her tea, sell tickets for people to watch. Except he knows that life would have been impossible without her. And without Stewart, his mongrel dog. Patience and Stewart are all he’s got left of his family.

‘Working late,’ he calls back. Stewart has raced out of the kitchen and is turning circles with excitement to see him. AJ hangs his jacket on the hook and bends to scratch the dog behind the ears. ‘Remember that thing called work? Things are hard at the unit.’ Beyond hard, he thinks, beyond hard. That word ‘delusions’ Melanie Arrow used keeps niggling at him. It’s as if she knows exactly what he dreamt last night – as if she’s worked out that he’s just as susceptible to the eeriness of Beechway as anyone else.

‘Come on, mate.’ He goes wearily into the living room with Stewart. Patience is sitting there, her feet up, her arms folded stubbornly, a cup of tea at her elbow. The room is so comfortable, a big warm fire and stacks of wood he’s cut piled up alongside. Squishy familiar sofas and chairs, hodge-podge patchwork cushions his mum made. Aunt Patience watches him sink into the settee, exhausted. She knows him so well. This is where he comes to re-set his head.

‘Breakfast’s in the oven,’ she says. Breakfast in this house is a moveable feast – it happens whenever AJ arrives home, regardless of what his shift is – two in the afternoon or two in the morning – food is there, ready for him. The kitchen is always filled with aromas that could make a grown man cry. ‘I cooked it and cooked it and I got to the place where I thought I was wasting my time.’

‘I’m sorry. I should have called.’

‘You sure you haven’t got yourself a lady friend, AJ?’ Even Aunt Patience calls him AJ these days. ‘Me and Stewart don’t mind – we’ll be fine on our own for a night or two.’

‘No lady friend.’

‘You sure?’

Patience is always going on about him finding a girlfriend. Something about her obsession with it makes him wonder how she would actually react if he did. Whether she’d be more threatened than pleased by it.

‘I don’t know, Patience, but you must think I work at a dating agency. Or location-scouting for a lingerie photographer or something.’

‘I know where you work.’

‘Well then. It’s not exactly Girl Central.’

Patience purses her lips. ‘If you’d rather be out there romancing a tree.’

‘Please.’ He folds his arms, looks at the ceiling. ‘I can’t take a tree-hugger lecture today.’

For two years in a row he’s belonged to a club that makes cider. They brew and compete with each other to get the best cider possible. And it just so happens that one of the traditions associated with cider making is wassailing. It’s an old West Country tradition in which the trees are thanked for their year’s yield and asked to produce another yield in the coming year. Then there’s a bit of dancing and yelling to scare away bad spirits from the trees, and, because he and the lads thought it was a nice way to pass the time testing their brewing skills, Patience has got it into her head he’s a hippy, bypass-protesting eco-terrorist – prepared to spend his life in a culvert if it means saving a single crested newt. She’s got some neck giving him a hard time about it – like she can talk. If she’s not in the betting shop she’s out in the fields collecting sloe and damson for her big illegal stills in the garage, always rooting around for fruit to make her non-stop jams. The cottages have land – oh, land aplenty – but no garden whatsoever. Outside, it’s lines and lines of labelled furrows like Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit watercolours. Patience is in perpetual turmoil over what the deer and the muntjacs have eaten, and whether the rabbits are going to get at the vegetable patch this year. She knows exactly what food is in season at any given time – if he asked her right now she’d reel off a list: pumpkins, artichokes, medlars, cabbage. He never calls her a tree hugger.

He gets up and goes through to the kitchen, where he gathers breakfast. Mountains of Patience’s scrambled egg and fennel. A pile of sautéed chestnut mushrooms. Three thick rashers of bacon. He adds tomato ketchup and a big wedge of home-made bread and sits at the table to eat.

He was the one who found Zelda dead. It was just after he’d come on shift. She was lying on her back, her mouth open slightly as if she was snoring. Her arms were still bandaged from the self-harm episode twelve days before. AJ hasn’t told Patience about it; he doesn’t want to say the words:
I found someone dead
. Because he knows the sentence that comes after it would be:
That’s the second time in three years
. He and Patience talk about Mum, they have her picture everywhere, but they don’t really talk about how it happened.

Out of the window, beyond the monster power-station towers, he can see the daylight catching the River Severn. Slowly, slowly, the unit slides away from him and he’s just a man again. An ordinary man in his ordinary kitchen, eating an ordinary breakfast at his ordinary table.

The Man from the East

THE LAND SURROUNDING
Bristol’s so-called ‘feeder’ canal was once the city’s hub for coal-gas generation, an industry which left long tracts of the land unusable due to high levels of cyanide. In spite of an expensive urban-regeneration programme in the 1980s it remains a speckled and bitty landscape, home to derelict churches blitzed in the war, car showrooms and industrial units. The old bonded warehouses that line the canal have been largely bricked up. It is to this bleak corner of the city that the Major Crime Investigation Team has moved its operations, into a cast-concrete 1970s building which once served as offices for an electricity company.

Caffery is one of the few people in MCIT, aside from the superintendent, who has managed to carve out a personal space in the vast open-plan offices. His has a view of the Spine Road flyover and the cream-and-orange tower blocks at Barton Hill. The room contains a desk, chairs, a small red Ikea sofa, a coffee- and tea-making station with a tiny portable fridge that can barely accommodate a six-pack of beers and a carton of milk. There are no personal photographs or certificates or press clippings, just a large photograph of Misty Kitson and the filing cabinet with her case papers in it. He wheeled it in here when there wasn’t enough space in the incident room for other, more active operations. On the wall next to Misty’s photo three laminated OS maps bristle with pins of different colours. Each has a significance to him – locations connected to Misty’s disappearance. Other locations remain in his head. They are the ones that haven’t yet been brought to the attention of his colleagues.