Poppet

Hotel du Vin, The Sugar House, Bristol

AS THEY DRIVE it becomes clear that Jacqui Kitson has been trailing Caffery all day. She veers between drunken flirtatiousness, and abusive, furious tears.

‘You’re so fucking fit,’ she says, sucking angrily on her cigarette. ‘I’d give you one if I didn’t hate you so much. You ugly bastard.’

From what he can piece together she has parked her car near his office in St Philips and has been following him on foot ever since. Tomorrow she’s got an interview with a national newspaper. They are paying for her hotel and probably she’s planned it so she could accost Caffery at the same time. She started drinking at lunchtime.

Jacqui Kitson, being who she is, has chosen the Hotel du Vin – because celebrities occasionally stay here and it’s got a bit of boutiquey glamour to it. The staff give pained smiles when she arrives, dishevelled and smelling of vomit – escorted through reception by someone who has the demeanour of a security guard – except for the red stains on his shirt and collar.

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.’