Mo Hayder - Poppet

She finishes the plate. Delicately dabs her mouth, then hands it to Patience, who takes it without a murmur. She doesn’t offer Melanie any more food.

It means the test has been passed.

THE TRANSACTION AT Wickes was in cash and itemized by the superstore. It took Kieran Bolt just two minutes to find it. He and Caffery stood in silence and read through the record of what Handel bought fifteen minutes before he paid for the docking station. To anyone else the list might have seemed innocuous. To Caffery, knowing what he did about Handel, it read like a bullet-point inventory of warning signs:

Copper wiring

Crocodile clips (seven different colours)

Hacksaw blade

Stanley knife

Pliers

Mercifully, back at the MCIT offices, the superintendent has gone home – so no big self-justification exercises needed. The building is almost empty. Caffery closes the blinds and clears the desk. In the corner are six green transport crates: Isaac’s paperwork up from Archives. Caffery lifts the first on to the desk. He opens a folder and begins to read.

Handel lived at Upton Farm from the day he was born. At twelve he was already coming to the attention of the school for his increasingly withdrawn behaviour and bizarre outbursts. He was moved to a school for the learning disabled. Everyone knew Isaac was troubled, but evidently neither his teachers, social services nor his parents realized how dangerous he was. Not until it was too late.

Next to Caffery’s mouse mat is the copy of the Wickes receipt. It connects so blatantly to what happened next it’s almost surreal. Like a joke. He takes a pen and begins underlining some of the items on the list. The first is:

Stanley knife

On 2 November, when Isaac was fourteen, he took a Stanley knife to his parents’ throats in the master bedroom of their house. Isaac’s father fought back, but he had the beginnings of heart disease and was no match for his adolescent son. Isaac incapacitated him by running the blade under his chin, opening up his windpipe and damaging the oesophagus. He did the same to his mother. For a while both victims were still breathing through the holes in their necks. It was blood loss that would eventually kill them.

Pliers

After cutting their throats, Isaac really went to town on them. He stayed with them for hours. While they died he carved their faces and cut off their ears. He cut out their tongues and removed several of their teeth, using, the pathologist speculates, a wrench. Like the one on the Wickes receipt.

Nothing Handel removed from the bodies was found at the scene. And to this day none of the body parts has been traced. Some of the investigating officers speculated that he threw them out of the window and they were eaten by wildlife. Others insist the only way Isaac could have feasibly removed the things from the scene was to have ingested them. There is, however, no record of Isaac being examined or X-rayed. Teeth at least would have shown up in his stomach on an X-ray, Caffery thinks. But with a CSI’s dream of a crime scene – with a defence of insanity – no police force in the country opens its piggy bank to dig deeper in an investigation. That only happens when a Misty Kitson goes missing.

Wire and crocodile clips

Graham and Louise Handel were discovered positioned on their backs, their mouths wide open. That may have been the result of the muscles spasming when their son wrenched their teeth out. The remaining sockets are black and blood-streaked in the photographs. In the report the pathologist notes time and time again he was unable to make an accurate examination due to the delays encountered because of ‘circumstances’ at the crime scene. Without immediate access to the bodies a lot of his conclusions were leaps of faith. He could only estimate that it took Mrs Handel in excess of thirty minutes to die, Mr Handel a little less – maybe eighteen to twenty minutes. Nor could he say whether their open mouths were a result of rigor mortis – or whether Isaac managed to position them like that in death.

The ‘circumstances’ preventing the crew getting to the bodies are logged by several parties: the forensics investigators, the first attending officer, the SIO. And they make Caffery even more uneasy.

At a place exactly equidistant to the door and to the bodies, Handel had placed a length of wire. The first attending was canny enough to spot it and instantly called in military bomb-disposal experts. It took them ninety minutes to travel from Salisbury and make the scene safe. They explained that anyone entering the scene unwittingly would have triggered a chemical explosion that would have ignited the entire room. A booby-trapped crime scene. It’s so clever.

When Caffery’s finished reading he turns the last page of the CSI report face down in the box, closes the lid and contemplates it. There’s something awry here – an inconsistency or anomaly, something he can’t quite put a finger on … He sits with his thumbs digging into his temples, trying to concentrate. But he can’t quite nail it.

He drags across the photograph of Isaac Handel. Many people claim that they can see evil in a person’s eyes, and Caffery sometimes wonders if he’s missing a vital component, because in all his years in this job, with all the killers and rapists and child murderers he’s met, he’s never ever been able to look into the eyes of a killer and see evil. In Isaac Handel’s eyes he sees nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as if there’s an impenetrable barrier slotted down there behind the irises.

Again he wonders what was missing from the report. And when he can’t come up with an answer he leans back in his chair, hands folded across his stomach, and lines up his thoughts in a row.

Assume, he tells himself, because all the signs are there, that Handel is not rehabilitated and that he is a danger to himself and to the public.

Assume that what happened in Beechway High Secure Unit is secondary.

Assume finding Isaac Handel is primary.

Assume that the superintendent won’t raise the budget on this to a homicide until Zelda’s post-mortem is re-done, and that he certainly won’t be interested in a ghost in a psychiatric unit.

All of which means Caffery has to do things the hard way – finding Handel on his own.

And, as with most things in life, assume the best place to start is at the beginning.

MELANIE IS STILL loaded down with food and slow moving. The sex she and AJ have that night is the sort that belongs on a desert island, lazy and leisurely and un-showoffy. It takes for ever; it’s speechless. Afterwards she amazes him by curling up next to him, holding him tightly, as if she’s clinging on to a life raft. He drifts off to sleep in the middle of studying her – mapping every detail of her face. He’s in the same position, on his back, arm pushed out to the side, when he wakes.

She’s still lying on his arm but she’s wide awake, prodding him.

‘ AJ? AJ?’

‘Yeah? What?’ He rubs his eyes, props himself up on his elbows and looks around groggily. His first thought is Isaac Handel, but the curtains are closed. ‘What’s up?’

Mel kisses his ear. She smells of warm orange and shampoo. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetheart. Don’t think I’m being rude, but would you ask Stewart to go out on to the landing?’

Stewart is in his usual place next to the door, lying down. He’s wide awake too – eyes fixed on AJ and Melanie. ‘Stewart? Why? What’s he done?’

‘Nothing.’ She gives a little shiver. Dabs her nose with a tissue. Sniffs. ‘Maybe he’s been out in the grass – I don’t know – it’s just my allergy’s kicking in.’