Mo Hayder - Poppet

No. He’s not there yet.

He takes one last look around the room, then starts along the corridor and back down the stairs. Outside, the clouds have cleared briefly; pale sunshine floods the farmyard, glancing off his windscreen. He wonders about the woman who reported the murders. What could she have seen to alert her?

Caffery turns and gauges the distance from here to the road. That’s wrong to start with – the bottom part of the house isn’t visible from the road. The crime-scene report says Pilson responded to the call and he arrived at six forty-five p.m. That he followed a blood trail that led from the house to the barn. The fence and the paved area are new – fifteen years ago, the house and barns would have stood on the same concrete courtyard. A cop responding to a triple-nine call would pull up outside the house, and his first instinct would be to look for casualties. According to the report, the front door was open. The distance from the house to the barns is approximately twenty-five metres. So why didn’t Harry Pilson go into the house first?

Caffery crosses to the right-hand barn. It was in this barn, the larger of the two, that Handel was cornered and arrested. The large doors are padlocked, so Caffery tries the small access door. It’s bolted but not locked, and it swings open. The barn is still being used to store straw and hay. Inside, it is surprisingly warm, a little dusty, and all the sounds from outside are muffled. He blinks – his eyes adjusting to the gloom. A shaft of grey sunlight from the partly open door falls at an angle to his right, catching motes of hay dust and casting a small square of light on the floor of the barn. There’s a sound – a churr, churr rising in pitch, again and again, and ending on the third churr , with a decisive cluck . Hens – half a dozen of them – stalk out of the shadows, into the small square of light and begin to scratch and peck at the floor, searching for insects and spilt grain.

Caffery looks at the picture on his phone. Pilson said he spotted Handel in the hayloft – right from this spot. The hayloft is almost directly above him, and Caffery cranes his neck, trying to find the correct line of sight. All he can see is planking overhead; he can’t see the edge of the loft. He steps inside the barn, keeping his palm flat against the door to prevent it slamming closed and cutting off the light. The hayloft rim is still out of his line of sight.

‘And that’s just not right,’ he murmurs. He jams his ASP baton between the door and the frame to keep it open, and takes a couple more steps inside. The hens scatter noisily into the dark. Again he stares at the hayloft.

He stands there for a long time – thinking about the phone call, the blood trail, and the rest of the bullshit in the report. Yup, he thinks, bullshit.

That’s what’s been bugging him all along. Sergeant Harry Pilson’s report is all lies.

THE JAMS ARE all potted and now need time to cool. Penny lies on the sofa, a blanket pulled up around her. She’s weary – she didn’t sleep well and when she woke this morning she was in no doubt. The quilt next to her was warm. She felt it all over, trying to understand how this quirk of temperature had happened. The shutters weren’t open for the sun to come in and she hadn’t been lying on it – the blankets were still tucked around her. There was no explaining it. It was just as if Suki had been there.

She sighs and lifts her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Her breasts chafe at the underside of the blankets – a sudden, crackling reminder of what it was to be sexual. Sensuality has been Penny’s undoing. Over the years she’s eaten too much and drunk too much and loved too much, in all the wrong places. You get told as youngsters that a type of emotional incontinence, a stray hedonistic streak, will lead to no good. You never believe it – until, lo and behold, it leads to no good.

Fifteen years ago Penny was married. Not happily, but respectably and without rancour. Not much sex, but equally no fighting and no poison. Then her hormones sabotaged everything. She met the Handels at a village party and soon she and her husband became friends with the attractive couple from Upton Farm. Graham in particular was good-looking – tall with a touch of danger about him that pricked Penny’s senses wide awake. Graham, for his part, took one look at the pretty cook who had moved into the Old Mill and knew exactly where his life was going to take him. Penny didn’t stand a chance.

The affair evolved slowly, almost under the noses of their respective spouses. Louise Handel travelled away on business a lot and that allowed Graham and Penny to spend more time together. She grew to know a lot about the Handels and their lives. More than she wanted to know. She found they had a son who didn’t attend the local school but was taken out of the county to a ‘special’ school. Isaac definitely had needs. Introspective and unable to look anyone in the eye, on occasions when Penny encountered him with his parents she tried to get through to him but failed.

Sometimes when Louise was away Graham would send Isaac outside to play while he and Penny locked themselves in the spare bedroom on the top floor. Penny worried about Isaac outside – his silence was disturbing – maybe he suspected what was happening. Maybe he would tell his mother. After sex, she would look out of the window under the eaves and watch Isaac playing – always solitary and a bit too intense for a thirteen-year-old who should be out kicking a football with his friends. Usually he would be squatting, completely absorbed in some private task. Making something.

One day, during school hours, Penny happened to be passing Isaac’s bedroom on her way to get a glass of water. Ordinarily she’d have walked straight past – she’d made a pact with herself never to pry into the life of Graham’s family. Today, however, Graham was showering, Louise was away on business and Isaac’s door stood open. It was too tempting. On his bed was a small tin. Curious, she crept inside, sat on his bed and opened the tin. Inside she found a collection of odd little dolls made from scraps of leather and pieces of stick. One wore a crudely made track suit, fashioned from scraps of fabric Penny recognized as belonging to Louise. The other doll was male. It wore trousers of brown cord – similar to a pair Graham had in his wardrobe.

Penny chose not to mention the dolls to Graham. She wasn’t sure why – was it because they were so disturbing? Or was it because they felt like a subtle key to her lover’s private world? Over the following weeks she increased the times she went into Isaac’s room and from what she found and the snippets of information she got in conversation from Graham, began to piece together what was happening to the boy. She decided that anyone or anything who had upset or angered Isaac would have a doll made in their likeness. These strange mini-representations of people and creatures populated the adolescent’s world. A neighbour’s notoriously bad-tempered cat – who had once scratched Isaac – was depicted with a toilet roll as the body, real hair stapled to it, eyes glued on clownishly. Its paws, Penny noticed, were bound, and the hair seemed to be real cat hair. She stole a few strands and the next day secretly compared it to the cat. The hairs appeared to match.

Graham told Penny that at Isaac’s school there was a little girl who had a habit of stealing. She must have been driven by the thrill, because the purloined objects followed no logical pattern – sweets and toys and money and clothing and pencils and pieces of paper and socks. She stole the pencil shavings from someone’s sharpener, just to prove she could. The day Isaac’s football disappeared from his show-and-tell shelf was the day he came home and made an effigy of the little girl in a torn blue gingham that exactly matched the girls’ uniforms at Isaac’s school. It had long black hair made of wool and one hand tied behind its back. The stealing hand, forever disabled.