Poppet

The Truth About Misty Kitson

EIGHT HOURS SEARCHING for Misty Kitson’s body and Flea Marley’s diving unit, which is here because it has a remit to assist with any search, land-or water-based, has worked hard, using scientifically formulated patterns. They have been given a hundred-metre band which encircles the area covered a year ago when Misty first went missing. This search is an extension of the original two-mile radius around the rehab clinic – an austere, white Palladian building that sits high on a hill. It is going to take a week to complete and as far as any of the searchers can tell it’s based not on new intelligence but on MCIT’s urgent need to prove to the media they are still doing something. By mid-afternoon the team has found nothing and the light is dying. They drive back to the offices in their white Mercedes Sprinter van, their spirits low. Some of the men jump straight into their cars and head home, others take time to warm up – brewing tea and showering – letting the hot water dig out the cold in their bones.

Flea is the last one left in the building. She stands in the shower with her eyes closed, the water thrumming on the back of her neck, thinking about the day. A full-on, rapid-edit montage of all the places they’ve searched unreels in her head. Smash cut: the clinic perimeter; match cut: electricity substation; jump cut: a B road. Jack Caffery standing silently, watching her, the same way he watched her running this morning. Not speaking.

She hasn’t let his scrutiny bother her – she’s searched the locations painstakingly, acting her heart out. Only she knows it’s a waste of time. Misty’s bones aren’t lodged in a hedgerow. Or scattered in a field, or buried in a shallow grave in one of the copses near the clinic. They are several miles away from the clinic – on the other side of the county.

Flea Marley knows this because she is the one who concealed the body. Almost eighteen months ago. It’s one of the things she’s been working to keep locked in a box inside her head. One of the things she can’t look at unless she wants to lose the secret of flying. Crash and burn.

She switches off the shower, steps out and towels off. The offices are empty now – it’s just her and row after row of diving suits hanging like ghosts in the kit room. The masks in the locker room. The dead-body bags in the technician’s room. No one to check on her or ask her what she’s doing. She wipes steam off the mirror with the towel and stares at her reflection. Yes, she’s fuller in the face – her skin is healthier – but now MCIT is reinvestigating Misty’s disappearance, there’s a thin, scared tightness around her eyes again.

She has been faintly desperate all day – thinking at any moment she was going to cry. It’s weird no one has noticed it. Even now she has to count to ten, until she’s sure she’s not going to start blubbing like a baby. Then she sprays on deodorant, pulls her sports clothing out of her rucksack and dresses slowly. Lots of layers – it’s cold out there. She pulls waterproof trousers on over her leggings, and a big force-issue Montane jacket. She stuffs nitrile and Thinsulate gloves into her pocket, turns off all the lights, checks all the computers are switched off, and heads out to the car park, her face down.

Rush hour has died, but it still takes more than an hour to wind her way across the north of Somerset. She passes close to her house, close to the clinic – the key places on the vast storyboard of what really happened to Misty Kitson all those months ago. When she stops, it’s on a small C road a mile south-east of the clinic, at the bottom of two huge fields that sweep down from the woods around Farleigh Park Hall.

All day while the team have been searching she’s surreptitiously monitored this location on the map – sliding her secret attention over to it on the dashboard – calculating how long before the planned search would come round to this road. It’s just outside the area searched last year, and it’s slated to be covered in this new sweep. Probably it’ll be late the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.

She opens the car door and drops her feet on to the tarmac. It’s so quiet this far out in the countryside – real live things live out here – like deer and badger and rabbit. Somewhere an owl is hooting – up in the trees at the top of the slope. Even concentrating, she can’t hear a single engine – not a car or an aeroplane. Nothing. She hauls out her rucksack and shoulders it. Kicks the door closed.

This road is a small, rarely frequented route – a few farmers’ fields on the left, forest on the right. She knows it well. As she walks, high up beyond the trees ahead, the faint glow of lights from a hamlet appear. There was a murder in that hamlet not so long ago. All the American and Chinese and Japanese tourists who come round here and make goggle eyes at the pretty cottages and thatches and village greens … they don’t know the half of it. The unzippered ugliness of it all. The killings, the rapes, the wife beatings, the jealousy, the hit and runs.

Yes, the hit and runs. People never spare a thought for all those hit and runs.

The road takes an abrupt bend to the left, then continues in a straight, roman line for the next half a mile – flat and opaque, until it dwindles into the night a hundred metres ahead. Above the clouds the moon is full and it sends down a scattered, diffuse glow that’s sufficient to navigate by. She walks, pacing out the steps, counting in her head. Fifty metres down she stops and turns to face the fields, surveying them with her razor-sharp knowledge. She turns to the hamlet and does the same. The bearings are slightly wrong, so she continues a few more paces and repeats the exercise. This time she gets it straight away. Yup. This is where it happened.

She lowers her rucksack to the ground and clicks the head torch on. It has to be angled down so it’s illuminating the tarmac. The area needs to be searched in the finest detail. Things need to be removed before the team comes through here. One slip and she will be in the deepest shit. If she has to put half the hedgerow into her rucksack, she’s going to. There mustn’t be anything – anything at all – to connect this location with what really happened to Misty Kitson.

She pulls on the nitrile gloves and sets to work. It’s no different from any other fingertip search she’s done – a regular grid pattern to make sure every inch of the road is covered. She collects everything she finds – regardless of what – and puts it in the rucksack. A crisp packet, two beer tins, some toilet paper. A ring-pull that looks about fifty years old and an old CD. Maybe none of it is relevant, maybe all of it.

When she’s a hundred per cent sure there is nothing left here except the dead leaves and the naked blackberry bushes, she pulls the torch off her head and uses it to inspect the road itself – the tarmac. The skidmarks are still here but they are so, so faint. She has to sink to her haunches and rest her hand on them to believe they still exist. A year and a half ago they were like a deep scar on the road – but nearly eighteen months of rain and sun and English seasons have leached the rubber away.

The sound of a car engine grows in the distance. A few seconds later headlights – from the direction she’s parked. She gets up and steps smartly into the verge, clicking off the head torch as she does. As the car appears round the corner she presses herself tightly against a tree. Puts her hands in her pockets and drops her face, presenting as few reflective surfaces as possible.

The car passes. And almost instantly slows. And then, just fifty metres away, it stops. Her heart sinks. The engine is killed, and in the sudden silence comes the clear click of a door closing. Footsteps.

A crunch of gravel. Whoever it is they’re close, really close. Slowly, furtively, she rolls back into the shadows, her shoulders tight. She slides down the tree until she’s sitting and pulls the hood of her coat over her face. Like an ostrich. Head in the sand. She stays absolutely still, monitoring the footsteps. Just her and the thick drumbeat of her heart in her ears, greenish commas of light pulsing behind her eyes from the headlights. No reason for someone to stop out here in the middle of nowhere. No reason whatsoever. This is no-man’s-land.

The noise stops and she dares to glance sideways. There – about a yard away, are two feet in walking boots. The lizard part of her brain scurries over them – knows they’re familiar – can’t quite connect to why they are and what it all means.

She raises her eyes. DI Jack Caffery is standing there. Dressed in black all-weather gear. His hands in his pockets, looking down at her.