Poppet

Upton Farm

MOMENTS AFTER AJ leaves the building Caffery gets a call from Beatrice Foxton, the pathologist. She’s done the second post-mortem on Zelda and hasn’t been able to reach any further conclusions. Sometimes, she explains, we just have to hold our hands up. And say we don’t know for sure.

Caffery decides it doesn’t matter. He’s seen and heard enough about Handel to keep going anyway. He puts on a pair of nitrile gloves – as much for the sake of cleanliness as from a fear of contaminating evidentiary material – and packs the dolls into the holdall. He seals it in a bag he gets from one of the CSIs, then carries it to the car. Throws it in the boot and climbs into the car. He lets the engine run for a few minutes then sniffs. No smell coming from the dolls. Good. He puts the car into gear and heads out of the car park.

In the nineties when Handel murdered his parents, there was still such a thing as policing in villages. If the place was too small for a station, there would be a single cop who lived in an authority-owned police house, a cop who stepped out of his front door straight on to his beat – who knew not just the locals in the village itself, but the inhabitants of every lane and every farm in the area. He would have known Isaac and his parents. The photocopied transcript of the police notebook on the day of the murders states that a call from a nearby phone box went through to the village police station. That the cop, Sergeant Harry Pilson, was on the scene within ten minutes.

Upton Farm has changed hands three times in the years since the murders. The present owners, a couple who live two miles away, bought the place five years ago and let it out as a holiday home. Caffery stops off at their house to pick up a set of keys. The husband’s out, but the wife is there. She’s a forty-something woman with angry eyes and defiantly city hair; it’s clear country living is an aesthetic choice and not what she was born to. Every inch of the place is filled with the sort of country living that townies aspire to: oilskins and designer wellies. Paintings on the wall that are self-consciously artisan in their appearance. She probably hopes he’ll admire it, but he’s known women like her before and is too old to waste his time lying. He declines her offer of coffee and asks for the keys to Upton Farm.

‘You’ve always rented it out?’

She gives a short laugh. No humour. ‘We’ve always tried to rent it out. If anyone would take it. This area is supposed to be a popular holiday destination, but I’ve only had six rentals this year. And two of those changed their mind after the first night there. Walked out and demanded their money back.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’d put it on the market, but who would want it? Only some London idiots like us who don’t know its history.’

Outside, it’s a cold, damp day. Wisps of vapour streak up from the red-and-orange forests that line the valleys and cling to the cliffs like low cloud. Caffery has the heating on full blast as he drives, along back lanes wide enough for one car, with passing places at intervals – and God help the traveller who meets a tractor coming the other way. On the passenger seat is Sergeant Pilson’s report from the day of the murders. One of the DCs at MCIT is checking whether Pilson still lives in the area. If he does, they’ll message Caffery his contact details.

In the nineties there were phone boxes deep in the countryside where the big telecommunications companies hadn’t yet got their signals. The call to Sergeant Pilson came from a phone box just to the south of Upton Farm – a woman driving past the farmhouse realized something was wrong. She drove on, got to the phone box and called. She gave her name and address, but when the investigating team tried to trace the witness her address turned out not to exist. Either she had lied, or, in Pilson’s own admission, he might have written it down incorrectly. Police press releases urging the person to come forward amounted to nothing. Ultimately it was the only loose end in a very tight case.

Upton Farm is about as high as you can get in this part of the world and as Caffery gets nearer clouds gather. The air turns whiter and his visibility dwindles. He skirts west of the dark Forestry Commission pine forest before heading northward. As he nears the farm, a few spots of rain begin to fall. It’s like crossing into the Himalayas. A sign at the roadside reads: Upton Farm Cottage – holiday lets available.

It’s similar land to where Caffery lives – but it’s higher, more lonely. He turns on to the driveway and the house comes into view. It’s a handsome three-storey Edwardian dwelling built from a blueish-grey shale. There’s a newly fitted slate roof and the windows are freshly painted. The sparkling panes reflect a perfect image of the surrounding conifers. Two large barns, constructed of wood which has been treated in pitch, stand on the opposite side of the concrete courtyard. Beyond them clouds have closed in; where distant hills should be visible is an impenetrable wall of shifting white.

Caffery parks in front of the house. A section of the concrete has been dug up and replaced, incongruously, with York stone flags. A couple of potted bay trees stand either side of the front door. An Edwardian-style boot scraper to the left of the doorstep completes the picture. Elegant rusticity.

He unlocks the front door and steps inside. The house smells of furniture polish and air freshener – everywhere are dotted dried-flower arrangements. The staircase has a polished-oak handrail and a hardwearing cord carpet runs up the centre of the risers. He’s transferred the crime-scene photos to his phone, and he opens the ones taken in this hallway and compares them to what is in front of him. In the nineties the staircase had an enclosed banister, wallpapered in stipple paint effect. Where he’s standing now, the wall was daubed with bloody handprints.

The handprints were an exact match. Handel was responsible for torturing, killing and mutilating his parents – no doubt about it. That’s not what’s wrong here. It’s something else. Caffery has no idea what. He goes slowly up the stairs, opening his mind and his ears and his skin to everything this place can communicate.

The room where Graham and Louise Handel were found is along the landing to the right of the stairway. When Isaac lived here this corridor was dark – carpeted in green Axminster with a leaf-swirl pattern. Now there are bare boards, stripped and waxed. The photos on Caffery’s phone show seven framed prints on the wall, all hanging askew from the violence that had taken place. Now the walls are bare. Painted grey.

He opens the door to the room slowly. The curtains are open, the light is chalky and flat. Here too, everything is as different as can be. An oak box bed with a scrolled leather headboard replaces the divan; a thick sheepskin rug at the foot of the bed covers the place Isaac’s parents died.

The trip-wire was between here and the bed. The bomb-disposal team had to work only inches from the mutilated bodies of Graham and Louise. The men should have been accustomed to carnage, but the experience evidently got to them – one of the team resigned his position the following day and became a teacher. Apparently he never explained his reasons to anyone.

Caffery comes in and squats, lifting a corner of the rug. The boards beneath it are as smooth and polished as the rest, but there is a slight tonal difference, a darker patina in the grain. A succession of new owners hasn’t been able to get rid of all the bloodstains.

He holds up his phone in front of the modern image of the room and zooms on the photo of Louise, pictured from this angle. She wears jogging trousers and a Dunlop T-shirt, and lies on her back, her mouth wrenched open. Blood trails from the corners of her mouth to her jaw. Her ears and some teeth are missing.

Caffery glances up and around – tries to picture the minimalist room with curtainless windows as it was in the nineties: old lumpy furniture, heavy curtains against dark windows. He closes his eyes and spins himself through the years. It’s not much of a leap for him to imagine that era, and it doesn’t bring him any closer to the nudging point of what is wrong with the whole scenario.

No. He’s not there yet.

He takes one last look around the room, then starts along the corridor and back down the stairs. Outside, the clouds have cleared briefly; pale sunshine floods the farmyard, glancing off his windscreen. He wonders about the woman who reported the murders. What could she have seen to alert her?

Caffery turns and gauges the distance from here to the road. That’s wrong to start with – the bottom part of the house isn’t visible from the road. The crime-scene report says Pilson responded to the call and he arrived at six forty-five p.m. That he followed a blood trail that led from the house to the barn. The fence and the paved area are new – fifteen years ago, the house and barns would have stood on the same concrete courtyard. A cop responding to a triple-nine call would pull up outside the house, and his first instinct would be to look for casualties. According to the report, the front door was open. The distance from the house to the barns is approximately twenty-five metres. So why didn’t Harry Pilson go into the house first?

Caffery crosses to the right-hand barn. It was in this barn, the larger of the two, that Handel was cornered and arrested. The large doors are padlocked, so Caffery tries the small access door. It’s bolted but not locked, and it swings open. The barn is still being used to store straw and hay. Inside, it is surprisingly warm, a little dusty, and all the sounds from outside are muffled. He blinks – his eyes adjusting to the gloom. A shaft of grey sunlight from the partly open door falls at an angle to his right, catching motes of hay dust and casting a small square of light on the floor of the barn. There’s a sound – a churr, churr rising in pitch, again and again, and ending on the third churr, with a decisive cluck. Hens – half a dozen of them – stalk out of the shadows, into the small square of light and begin to scratch and peck at the floor, searching for insects and spilt grain.

Caffery looks at the picture on his phone. Pilson said he spotted Handel in the hayloft – right from this spot. The hayloft is almost directly above him, and Caffery cranes his neck, trying to find the correct line of sight. All he can see is planking overhead; he can’t see the edge of the loft. He steps inside the barn, keeping his palm flat against the door to prevent it slamming closed and cutting off the light. The hayloft rim is still out of his line of sight.

‘And that’s just not right,’ he murmurs. He jams his ASP baton between the door and the frame to keep it open, and takes a couple more steps inside. The hens scatter noisily into the dark. Again he stares at the hayloft.

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.