Poppet

Berrington Manor

CAFFERY IS NOT enjoying the phone calls and organization required now this case has gone cross-border. The task of checking on Melanie’s welfare has been passed to his oppo in the Gloucestershire force. The message that comes back isn’t a happy one. The front door of her house stands wide open – there are signs of a struggle. The house has been ransacked and her car is missing. AJ – who must have known just from Caffery’s tone that Melanie was in danger – has appeared at the house. According to the Gloucestershire police, he’s filled them in on what he knows. The Serious Crime unit has been mobilized. Panic is mounting.

Jonathan Keay grew up in Berrington Manor. No house number, no street name. Just the house name, the village and the postcode. There can’t be many psychiatric nurses who were raised in a place like this, Caffery thinks, as he pulls into the property. The driveway, flanked by tall poplars like some grand French avenue, is almost half a mile long. A bank of floodlights comes on with his arrival, illuminating a smartly kept equestrian yard with stalls the size of dining rooms and highly polished finials on the partitions. Beyond he can see the pale expanse and hand-lettered signs of an outdoor ménage – jumping poles stacked in a three-sided barn. The grey stone chimneys of a sprawling mansion rise behind a high brick wall to his left.

He drags on the handbrake, cuts the engine and opens the car door. The yard is quiet, well swept and cleaned – in fact, there’s no sign of anything actually going on here. No straw bales or farm machinery or buckets or horse rugs draped over doors. No people. There are three high-end BMWs all in the same slate grey in an open car port facing the stables, but aside from that the place could be uninhabited.

He hasn’t called ahead. He doesn’t want the Keay family getting advance warning of his arrival. No time to dream up excuses. Maybe he should have made contact though, if only to check that someone is actually here.

The wrought-iron gate in the wall opens on to a knot garden of low boxwood hedges with a large conifer at the centre, its branches sweeping down in a dark tent shape. A stone bench encircles the trunk and a few modest pieces of statuary are dotted around, all uplit by invisible lamps. The house itself is three storeys, with an additional row of dormer windows in the roof. The trunk of an enormous wisteria winds across the entire lower half of the facade, gnarled and grey as the stone itself. The front door is closed and there are no lights on at the windows.

The heavy iron knocker echoes through the house. There’s a long silence. He’s about to turn and go back to the car when he hears a woman’s voice on the other side of the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police.’

‘Police?’

‘Nothing to worry about – just a few questions I want to ask.’

The door opens to reveal a woman in her late fifties – tall and extraordinarily elegant in her lavender-grey pashmina, her tailored jeans. Her angular face is framed with carefully cut greying hair. June Keay, he thinks. Jonathan’s mother.

‘DI Caffery.’ He hands her his card. She takes it and inspects it carefully. ‘I’ve driven up from Bristol. Can I come in?’

She hands it back. ‘My husband’s not here. Is it him you want to speak to?’

‘No – I want to talk about Jonathan.’

Her face falls. ‘Jonathan,’ she repeats woodenly. It’s neither a question nor a statement.

‘Yes. Jonathan.’

‘My son.’

‘You’re June Keay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come in?’

She stands back and opens the door to him. ‘I’m sorry – so rude of me.’

They go into a flagstoned kitchen where the Aga is turned up high. There is a woollen blanket on a chaise longue next to the window, with a pair of glasses and an iPad on it. Music is playing in an adjoining room, some kind of Gregorian chant. He can make out a deer’s head on the wall in there, and a boxed taxidermy scene mounted above a doorway – stuffed squirrels dressed as Victorian gentlemen gathered around a fireplace, smoking and drinking port. Lots of elegant furniture, lots of furniture polish, but no signs of life.

Mrs Keay closes the iPad. ‘He’s upstairs. I’ll take you up there in a minute. But first, can you tell me, is this about the fight?’

‘Fight?’

Mrs Keay searches his face for a long time. Then she gives a sad smile. ‘No, of course not. There was no fight, was there? He’s lied to me – I knew he was lying.’ She grips the back of the chaise longue, squeezing it distractedly. Her eyes draw vaguely to her reflection in the dark window. ‘He used to get the same look when he was a little boy. I said to my husband, “He’s lying again”.’

Caffery raises his eyebrows. ‘Lying?’

She sees his confusion and sighs. ‘He was gone for nearly twenty years – he went through one of those student things, hating our money. Paying back his debt to society. We didn’t have the chance to cut him off; he cut us off. And then …’ She pushes the hair off her forehead. ‘And then, out of nowhere, he came back.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if that was a good thing.’

‘Well, it would have been, if he wasn’t injured so badly.’

‘Injured?’

‘Didn’t you know? He’s been in hospital – he contracted septicaemia from his wounds.’

‘How did he get wounded?’

She frowns for a moment. ‘I thought that was what you were here to tell me.’