Poppet

Boxes

CAFFERY HAS COME straight from Penny Pilson’s to the search site and all the way the holdall containing Handel’s dolls has been making a low shuffling sound in the boot on the sharp corners. Now he knows their relevance, what they meant to Handel, he’s especially conscious of them. It’s tempting to stop the car and go back there to check the boot – if only to convince himself the little bastards haven’t climbed out of the bag. But then Flea gets into the car and he forgets all about Isaac Handel and starts thinking about Misty again.

They stop at a place just to the north-east of Bath. She shows him where to park: in a gravelled courtyard. Ahead stands a cottage. It is long and low – two-storeyed, spindling along for nearly twenty metres. Abutting it, coming out at right angles to form the second side of the yard, is a large house with a sheer brick wall topped by chimney stacks that block out the night sky. There are lights on in the only windows, which are high up, as if it’s a prison.

‘That’s the neighbours.’ Flea waves a hand at the wall. ‘And this’ – she indicates the rambling cottage, lit only by an old-fashioned coaching lamp covered in dead creeper – ‘is me.’

She swings out of the car, hefts her kit on her back and heads to the door. He gets out, looking around. In the moonlight he can make out the garden, which seems to be huge and unmanageable. Weed-choked and full of attempts at design that have gone wrong and been overgrown. Rose beds spill on to lawns that have grown into meadows and been defeated by the rains and the cold. What must once have been elegant terraces cascade down like jungle ledges, disappearing into the night. A wind comes up, blows straight through him. Autumn is here with a vengeance. He pulls his jacket tight and turns to follow Flea.

She dumps her kit outside the front door and uses a cast-iron boot scraper to lever off her boots. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Come in.’

He stands in the hallway unlacing his walking boots, glancing at the surroundings. The house is long and ramshackle and as untidy as his place, with boxes lining the corridor. But the thing that sets this apart from his house is a sense of home his remote and unloved cottage will never have. Everything smells faintly of open fires. He looks to his left, where the cottage extends off, the floor uneven, dried flowers in the mullioned windows. He looks to his right, where Flea has disappeared. At all the coats hanging on the painted peg board.

This was where it happened. This was where she struck the deal to cover up what her brother had done. He pushes the boots to one side and follows her through the house. The boxes are in every corner, taped and stacked. She is making coffee in the kitchen. She’s taken off her jacket and sweatshirt and is dressed in black combats and polo shirt with the Underwater Search Unit’s badge sewn on the front. Her blonde hair is bundled up carelessly. Her arms are a mass of scratches and gouges from the day’s search. As she fills the kettle she has to negotiate a taped box on the floor.

‘What’s happening here? You moving?’

‘Not in the way you think.’

‘Cryptic.’

‘Yep – cryptic.’

She bangs about the place, making a lot of noise getting things out of cupboards. Slams down cups and spoons and jars of sugar.

‘Your house?’ Caffery says. ‘You grew up here?’

‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Yes to both, thanks. It must have been a good place to grow up.’

She pauses, with the kettle poised above the cup, and he realizes his mistake. Her parents. He’s an idiot. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. ‘Sorry.’

She pours the water, adds some milk, mixes it quickly and hands him the cup.

‘Bring it with you – I’m going to show you what I had to do.’

They go down another passageway – it seems to Caffery that the house is a warren – until they get to a door which she opens to reveal a garage.

‘This,’ she says, ‘is where things got really nasty.’

The moon has found a niche in the clouds and has chosen this moment to scythe into the windows above the roll-up garage door. It picks out the filigree of spiders’ webs, makes them sparkle like Christmas decorations. On the walls, garden tools have been hung in neat order. Here too boxes are stacked. In the centre of the garage sits a cast-iron Victorian bath.

‘What happened?’

‘After four days – when I worked out what Thom had left in my boot – I brought the car in here. My first thought was the freezer—’ She indicates a chest freezer in the corner. ‘Then I remembered some pathologist telling me about ice-crystal artefacts. You heard of those?’

‘I think so. The heart muscle or something – you can tell if a body’s been frozen?’

‘Yes – so I had to keep her chilled. Cold but not frozen.’ She nods at the bath. ‘Gallons of ice in there until I could work out what to do with her.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I know. And I’m supposed to be the one who’s used to dealing with dead bodies. My job.’

She goes to the windows now and stands on tiptoe, peering at them – at the frames – as if they contain some hidden clue. It is freezing in here – her breath steams the glass. The moon slants sideways on her face. Seeing her now, next to the window, side lit by the moon, he realizes again how delicate she is. Whenever he looks at Flea the animal part of his brain lights up. His limbic system goes into overdrive. Sometimes it screams sex. Sometimes, like now, it screams protect. Kill anything that threatens her …

‘I taped off all the windows, but my neighbour knew something was going on.’ She’s looking at the towering wall of the neighbouring house. ‘Kept nosing around the place – I was going out of my mind. It was—’ She puts her finger to her forehead. Drops her weight back on to her heels. There’s a small pause. ‘Surreal. I still can’t believe it.’

She turns and gives him a rueful smile.

‘So that’s two counts against me – the record I was driving that night, and my neighbour. And as if those two weren’t enough, there’s more. Do you remember that bald guy – the POLSA on that job we did, the suicide on the Strawberry Line?’

Caffery remembers him well. Flea and the POLSA – an officer trained in search management – butted up against each other like a pair of billy-goats. ‘Yeah – you really didn’t like him.’

‘The feeling was mutual.’

‘You called him a combed-over old twonk.’

‘And I was right – he was a combed-over old twonk – proper jobsworth. It was a hate-hate thing from the moment we laid eyes on each other. What you didn’t see was where our relationship started – which was the day after Misty went missing from the clinic. The POLSA twonk wanted my unit to search a lake in the grounds of the clinic. I pulled the team a little earlier than satisfied him and he made a big deal of it – said if I was so confident Misty wasn’t in the lake maybe I knew something about where she was.’

‘Oh, OK – OK, so not brilliant.’

‘Not brilliant? I’m on record for speeding that night, my neighbour knows I was up to something at about the same time – her curiosity isn’t going to burn itself out overnight, you can put money on that. And I’ve been told, in front of witnesses, that I’m acting like I know where Misty is.’ She gives a deep, weary sigh. ‘And that’s before I even get started on the car.’

‘The car?’

‘The one that hit her. The one Thom was driving – the Ford. My Ford. It’s a time bomb. It only has to be forensicated and I’m screwed another way.’

In answer Caffery drains his coffee. Tips the cup upside down to see if there are any last drops. ‘I can make coffee too,’ he says.

‘Oh?’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Well done you.’

‘I think you should try a cup. Then you can judge.’