Poppet

Dirty Pink Satin

CAFFERY UNPICKS THE dolls and finds they contain a grotesque array of body parts and excretions. However, aside from the dolls representing Handel’s parents, the contents are things that have been taken or gleaned from people without violence: hair snippings, nail parings, scraps of clothing, numerous balled tissues stained in some unnameable secretion.

Isaac spent time in that big bedroom taking pieces of his parents and sewing them into the dolls. He didn’t eat the missing parts, or throw them out of a window. He carried them out in plain view.

As for the remaining dolls … this is where Caffery is on less concrete ground. He’s not sure who they are supposed to symbolize, but he’s guessing staff and other patients at Beechway. There is a male doll with, hideously, a red boiled sweet stitched into the socket where an eye would be. Caffery hasn’t forgotten AJ’s conviction that Handel had somehow talked one of the patients into taking his own eye out with a spoon. Moses.

Penny said she imagined there was a doll for her too. He hasn’t found anything that represents her – so maybe Isaac didn’t have any long-term plans for her. Nor has he found anything that relates to AJ or to Melanie Arrow – which is surprising, given that, as head of the unit, she would have represented power and authority in Isaac’s eyes. She’s an attractive woman in a position of power – even someone as sick as Handel would have noticed that.

Caffery isn’t sure whether he should be concerned by this absence or if it’s just a distraction. A case of projecting his own thoughts into someone else. He scribbles a note on the edge of his writing block. Pushes it to one side and continues his study of the other dolls.

Two have been set aside for particular scrutiny. These are the only dolls apart from the parents that have their eyes stitched closed. Maybe they represent other people Isaac has targeted. The two dolls are female. Although they appear to be dead, they are not twisted and tortured and stabbed the way Graham and Louise’s poppets are. Instead these two are cushioned on dirty pink satin, their hands folded over their chests. One is depicted as overweight, dressed in a garish red T-shirt and red socks. The other is dressed simply in crude pyjamas of blue ticking. Her hair is fashioned from strips of silk and it is the colour of soft cheese. Her body is nothing more than a wire frame draped in felt. She looks like a skin-covered skeleton.

On Caffery’s phone is an ante-mortem photograph of Pauline Scott. He looks at the poppet. He looks at the photo. He stares at the poppet again.

And then he picks up the phone.