Poppet

Jonathan Keay

BERRINGTON MANOR IS turning out to be the creepiest place Caffery has ever been. Jonathan, according to his mother, is on the top storey of the house. ‘He wants shelter in our home, but he doesn’t want to see us or speak to us. So you’ll understand if I don’t come into the room with you.’

She leads Caffery up narrow wood-panelled stairwells, not saying a word. The only noise is the creaking of the steps. Her back is rigid – it’s like following a prison warden, or a starchy matron in a boarding school. It crosses his mind that he won’t come out of here alive, that Mrs Keay is going to open a door and push him through it – and he’s going to find himself on a roller-coaster ride into the bowels of hell.

They get to the top floor – a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor with lamps set in the dormer windows. A slightly medicinal smell, mixed with the scent of saddle soap, hangs in the air. Mrs Keay stops at a door, her fingers on the handle. She turns to Caffery, giving him that sad smile again.

‘I’m sorry – I’d love to come in. But he won’t want me there.’

As Caffery steps through the door, Mrs Keay pulls the door closed behind him. He is left blinking in the gloom. She hasn’t locked the door, but that doesn’t take away the vaguest sense he’s somehow been hoodwinked.

‘Hello,’ says a voice. ‘You look like a cop.’

He turns. No greased rubbish chute to hell – instead it’s an attic room with two dormer windows and shaggy flokati rugs on the bare floorboards. A tall man with a closely cropped greying beard sits at a low desk in front of an iMac.

He pushes back his chair and swivels it to face Caffery. ‘You are a cop, aren’t you?’

‘You can tell?’

‘Got used to it over the years.’

Caffery blinks. His eyes are adjusting to the light and now he can see Jonathan a little more clearly. He’s in his late thirties and dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts. There’s pink Kinesio tape in a star on his right biceps.

‘Detective Inspector Jack Caffery.’

‘Jonathan Keay.’ He gets up and crosses the room. Shakes Caffery’s hand.

‘Are you ill?’

‘That depends on your perspective.’

‘Your mother said you were in a fight.’

There’s a long silence. Jonathan studies Caffery closely – his eyes travelling over his face. ‘Are you going to sit down?’ he says.

‘Am I invited?’

‘Why do you think I said it?’

Caffery goes to a white leather designer chair with a steel pipe frame. He sits on the edge of it, peering at Jonathan, noting the sinewy limbs scattered in freckles. There are boxes of medication stacked on the cabinet next to the bed and the pink tape on his arm disappears up under his sleeve and emerges just out of the neck of his T-shirt.

‘Mr Keay. A few things I need to ask … and can I start with Hartwool Hospital, Rotherham? You worked there?’

Jonathan sits down wearily, as if he’s resigning himself to a long and inevitably painful process. ‘That’s correct.’

‘And then from 2008 until last month you were working at Beechway.’

‘I was.’

‘I’ve been asked to look into some … inconsistencies at Beechway High Secure Unit.’

Jonathan clenches one hand, then opens it. Peers at it distantly. ‘Yes. I guessed that was why you were here.’

‘It is. Are you ready to talk?’

‘I am. But it’s not going to be easy.’

‘It rarely is. We’ll get there. Let’s begin at the beginning. Take me back to Rotherham.’

Jonathan moves his jaw from side to side. Eventually he begins to talk, haltingly, as if he is having difficulty with the words. ‘Yes – Rotherham. The mid-nineties.’

‘Keep going.’

‘One of the patients at Hartwool had a terror of being sat on at night. An anxiety disorder from childhood, something about being suffocated, I don’t know. There happened to be a grave on the site of the hospital, of a dwarf who’d been there when the place was a workhouse. It got conflated with the idea of something sitting on people – and it spread round the unit. We all tried to ignore it, but the hysteria kept building and then things started to happen – things we couldn’t put down to self-abuse. It escalated until finally we lost a patient. The inquest came back as suicide, but I was never convinced.’

‘The same as at Beechway?’

Jonathan shakes his head. ‘There never was a grave or a dwarf at Beechway – it was only at Rotherham. It was always Hartwool’s story.’

‘But you brought it to Beechway? Helped it take root?’

‘No.’

‘No? Then how did the story transplant itself down here?’

‘That’s what I’m going to tell you.’