Poppet Page 3

The Big Lurch is talking about the patients. No one would ever say it to a board member, but the staff call the patients Fraggles after Fraggle Rock. ‘Oh yes, they’re asleep. The magic is always there as long as we keep looking for it.’ He comes down the corridor. ‘What’re you up to?’

  ‘Oh, dunno.’ The Big Lurch gestures at the print, faintly embarrassed. ‘Just checking this out. Suppose I’ve never bothered to look at it before.’

  AJ peers at the framed print. It’s a watercolour of the workhouse from the mid-nineteenth century, when it was new. These prints are everywhere – they show Beechway High Secure Unit in various incarnations: copperplate etchings of it as the poorhouse, framed newspaper articles when a new director was appointed in the 1950s, even the 1980s artist’s impression of the finished, revamped unit with its wrap-around glass windows. He is drawn into the picture, noting the various recognizable parts of the building – the parts that have survived over a hundred and fifty years. There’s the central courtyard, the tower, the axis of the cross which is now the centre of the clover leaf.

  ‘I don’t like it in a storm,’ the Big Lurch says suddenly. ‘It makes me think about the weaknesses.’

  ‘Weaknesses?’

  He nods. ‘The places those eighties architects didn’t really think through properly.’

  AJ throws a sideways glance at the Big Lurch. What he sees there is the fear, the same uneasy look that’s becoming so familiar in the unit the last few days. He can’t believe it, just can’t believe it. He has long learned not to get too friendly with staff, but with the Big Lurch he’s made an exception. He likes this guy. He’s been for drinks with him – met his wife and his two little girls – and in all that time he’s never taken him to be impressionable.

  ‘Come on, mate. I’ve got enough problems with the patients without the damned security staff turning into big girls’ blouses.’

  The Big Lurch half smiles. He puts a finger up to his brow, as if to cover his embarrassment. He’s about to give a neat reply when the lights flicker. Both men put their heads back and stare at the ceiling. The lights flicker again. Then they seem to steady, and the corridor is as normal. AJ narrows his eyes – looks at the Big Lurch. There was a power cut a week ago – the last thing they need is another one. That will send the patients through the roof.

  ‘Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo.’ He sings out the Twilight Zone theme and makes ghost fingers in the Big Lurch’s face. ‘Come on, Scooby, let’s go hide under the sofa.’

  The security guy grins sheepishly, bats AJ’s hands away. ‘See, that’s why guys don’t share. Because of wankers like you.’

  AJ sighs. This isn’t going to be laughed off. The Big Lurch is genuinely, genuinely, not joking.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed, AJ? Everyone’s calling in sick?’

  ‘Yeah. I did happen to notice. You do a double shift to cover for people and it kind of etches itself on the memory.’

  ‘Yes. And you know what they’re saying? The staff?’

  ‘We don’t need to talk about this now.’

  The Big Lurch shifts uncomfortably. Runs a finger around his collar. ‘One of them woke up the other night. He was on Dandelion Ward and he woke up and he says he saw something in his room.’

  AJ laughs. Too loudly – the sound echoes down the corridor and back. ‘Oh, come on, that was an angina attack. They took him to the doctor and it was an angina attack.’ He shakes his head. ‘This – this whole … thing … it’s just—’

  ‘AJ, you know what I’m saying. I’m having a hard time getting any of the guys to do night shifts. If I rota them in I know I’m just going to get a call claiming they’re sick, or their car’s broke down or something.’

  AJ puts his hands in his pockets and looks at his feet. He knows where this is leading. Mass hysteria, that’s where. After years of silence on the subject of ghosts and haunting suddenly the stories and rumours are all back. Staff calling in sick, Monster Mother panicked, the Big Lurch antsy. And even he, AJ, getting infected. Dreaming about the damned thing.

  He looks up and down the corridor. It is still and empty. The only light comes from the knee-level security spots, the only noise is the ticker-tacker of branches and leaves on the windows. The time has come. He’s going to have to make it official – speak to the clinical director first thing in the morning. They’re going to have to nip this in the bud before the whole unit goes into meltdown.

  Hotel du Vin, The Sugar House, Bristol

  AS THEY DRIVE it becomes clear that Jacqui Kitson has been trailing Caffery all day. She veers between drunken flirtatiousness, and abusive, furious tears.

  ‘You’re so fucking fit,’ she says, sucking angrily on her cigarette. ‘I’d give you one if I didn’t hate you so much. You ugly bastard.’

  From what he can piece together she has parked her car near his office in St Philips and has been following him on foot ever since. Tomorrow she’s got an interview with a national newspaper. They are paying for her hotel and probably she’s planned it so she could accost Caffery at the same time. She started drinking at lunchtime.

  Jacqui Kitson, being who she is, has chosen the Hotel du Vin – because celebrities occasionally stay here and it’s got a bit of boutiquey glamour to it. The staff give pained smiles when she arrives, dishevelled and smelling of vomit – escorted through reception by someone who has the demeanour of a security guard – except for the red stains on his shirt and collar.

  Her suite is in the attic – a feature wall papered in bronze-and-black repeat patterns, low comfortable leather chairs and everywhere the painted cast-iron pillars that remain from the time this was a sugar warehouse. Her room looks out over the city centre – at eye level St John the Baptist church, lit up at night, rises into the sky.

  Jacqui immediately pours herself a vodka and orange from the minibar. When she goes into the bathroom Caffery empties the drink out of the window and fills it with orange juice. He sets it on the bedstand, then stands at the open window. It is freezing out there – he can hear the tinkling laughter of drinkers coming and going from the bars down in the streets.

  He’s been in this part of the country for over three years, and is slowly getting to learn the geography of Bristol as well as he knew the geography of his native South London. He knows all the bars and the crimes that have taken place at street level – can scroll back through the pub brawls and the murders. The barmaid in a place a few hundred metres away, stabbed to death eight years ago by the customer who waited until the place emptied so he could be alone with his victim. A fight that ended with an eighteen-year-old having his face slashed a few metres further down the road. A takeaway next door to that, busted one day nineteen months ago for serving not just kebabs but also crack cocaine and ketamine.

  It is Caffery’s job to ferret out the secrets hidden under the veneer. His unit – MCIT – is the one that gets all the murders and difficult cases. The cases that need high-level attention. Like the one that’s making Jacqui so angry.

  The toilet flushes and she comes out again. She ignores the drink and throws herself on to the bed, face down.

  ‘You OK?’

  She nods into the pillow. ‘I took a sleeping pill.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘It’s the only idea.’

  Caffery checks his watch. It means he’s going to have to wait with her – make sure she doesn’t throw up and choke herself. Or go into a coma. He glances around the room. There’s a plush brown sofa with gold scatter cushions he can rest on. He draws the quilt over Jacqui then goes into the bathroom. Puts the plug in the basin and turns the taps on. While the sink fills he hunts through the various pill packets she has scattered around. There are no prescription drugs, just over-the-counter things – stomach-acid tablets and paracetamol and some slimming aids. Also a packet of Nytol, which he opens. One has been removed from the blister pack. He checks the bin and there are no empty pill packets. She hasn’t overdosed then.

  He hunts through all the
designer toiletries – finds a shower gel which he squirts into the sink until he can make a lather. Then he pulls off his shirt and drops it in the sink. He rubs the soap into it, scrubbing at the collar where the wine has soaked in. He rinses it, then hangs it over the huge rain-shower head.

  He goes back into the bedroom, drying his hands on a towel. Jacqui is exactly where he left her, on her front, her arms wide apart, her face turned to one side. He stands alongside her, head tilted, waiting and listening. Her eyes are closed and there’s already a faint snoring noise.

  He sits on a low animal-hide chair and surveys the room. There’s a TV but he’d wake her up. A couple of magazines. He leafs through them – nothing much to see. An article about a designer hotel on the outskirts of Bristol that holds his attention for a moment, because he was at the same hotel this lunchtime – attending the killer-boring Criminal Justice Forum. He recognizes the downlit beaten-copper sinks in the gents, the sweeping poured-concrete reception desk. He spent a few minutes at that reception desk, with a pretty, very professional woman – a blonde, who had some top-drawer position in a local health trust – talking shop, all the while his primitive brain conjecturing in a vague, theoretical way whether or not he could get her into bed. She was the only interesting thing about the event. Otherwise it was eminently forgettable.

  He tries to read a little longer, but can’t concentrate. He drops the magazine and looks around the room again. There is a lavish hand-tied bunch of flowers shoved into an ice bucket on the drinks table. Caffery gets up, goes to the flowers, and reads the card. It’s from the newspaper Jacqui is supposed to be giving an interview to. Misty, her twenty-five-year-old model daughter, walked out of a rehab clinic on the Wiltshire border a year and a half ago. She was a drug addict and having relationship problems with her footballer boyfriend, but neither of those things was sufficient to explain why she was never seen again. Every avenue has been searched over and over – and there are still no clues. She was simply there one day, not the next. Thousands of people go missing each year and if they’re ordinary, adult and competent, the police time spent on them is embarrassingly little. But Misty was a celebrity of sorts; young, pretty. The media has kept the interest going long after police would normally have given up. Jacqui Kitson has been a regular face in the tabloids – pictures of Jacqui in the last place Misty was seen, on the sweeping white steps of the clinic, gazing pensively up at the building where her daughter spent her final days. Posing with a photo of Misty and a handkerchief clutched to her face. She dishes every insult about police incompetence she can muster.

  Each of her words is a knife in Caffery’s side. He is the Senior Investigating Officer tasked with finding Misty and the case has been haunting him for ages – it has been bounced back and forward between MCIT and the review team until Misty’s name has burned a hole through his head. But truth is stranger than fiction and the world is never what it seems: for over a year Caffery’s been hopscotching over the issue, he’s been guarding the case like a hound, appearing to be working on it while simultaneously leading the unit away from what he really knows about Misty’s disappearance – which is more, much more, than any cop has a right. It’s a big fat secret he’s been hiding. Something he can’t do anything about.

  He replaces the card gently amongst the gaudy blooms. Can’t? Or won’t? Or is he just not quite ready? There’s one more bridge to cross, the one he’s been avoiding for months.

  ‘I know,’ Jacqui says suddenly from the bed. ‘I do know.’

  Caffery thought she was asleep. He approaches slowly. She doesn’t open her eyes, but nods, as if to acknowledge him. She hasn’t moved, her eyes are closed, her voice muffled.

  ‘I do know.’

  ‘Know what, Jacqui? What do you know?’

  ‘I know she’s dead.’

  That Misty is still alive hasn’t realistically crossed the mind of any of the officers on the case – not for months and months. It shakes Caffery a little to realize that it’s taken time and work for Jacqui to come to the same conclusion.

  ‘And I’m OK with it,’ she continues, her eyes still closed, only her mouth working. ‘I am OK with her being dead. There’s just one thing I need.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I just need her body back. You don’t know what it’s like, not to have a body to bury. It’s all I want.’

  The Maude

  LEGEND HAS IT that Maude is the ghost of a matron from when Beechway High Secure Unit was a workhouse, back in the 1860s. Born a dwarf, she’d risen to a position of authority in the workhouse through sheer determination and single-mindedness. It was a position she abused. It is said that children who misbehaved would be subjected to Sister Maude straddling their chests, spooning ‘medicine’ into their mouths until they choked. That she would make the children write out biblical texts – line after line until their fingers bled. Some versions of the myth say Sister Maude had something under her robes she kept private: that she wasn’t really a ‘sister’ at all but actually a male dwarf dressed as a female.

  Four and a half years ago, just before AJ first came to work on the unit, an anorexic patient named Pauline Scott had convinced herself something was coming into her room at night. She claimed it would sit on her chest, would try to suffocate her. She’d showed the doctor where her thighs had been slashed. The words Be thou not one of them that committeth foul acts had been gouged into her leg. Two unfolded and bloodied paper clips had been found in Pauline’s bin – which she denied all knowledge of. No one much liked Pauline, they thought the engraving on her legs was apt. She’d been returned to Acute Assessment, where they’d monitored her for three weeks.

  When AJ arrived, shortly after the incident, it was all the staff could talk about. At night in the nurses’ station there’d be whispers and jokes, people trying to spook each other hiding in dark doorways. A few took it seriously – an agency nurse on a midnight shift swore she heard the scratches of fingernails on a windowpane and refused ever to set foot inside the unit again. One of the more highly strung social workers claimed she’d once looked out of a window and seen a dwarf sitting on the lawn, wearing a white Victorian gown. The dwarf was doing nothing. Just watching the unit. Its face was smooth and shining in the moonlight.

  AJ was one of those who found it little more than entertaining – a bit of a diversion. Then The Maude paid another visit. And this time it wiped the smile off everyone’s face.

  Moses Jackson was a long-stay patient – a grizzled grey guy with thin limbs and a nasty attitude. A downright, whole-enchilada, nasty little shit. He was vicious and deceitful and rude. He would call the female staff ‘Splits’ and was always pulling down his pants to show them his penis. Female staff couldn’t be alone with him, which complicated his care and made him even more time-consuming. Of course if any of this was pointed out to Moses he’d scream racism and demand that the Trust’s top brass came and met him to explain what they were going to do about it.

  AJ was still a nurse in those days. He’d arrived for the early shift that morning to find the place in chaos: nurses were rushing around from ward to ward, grabbing notes, grabbing phones, council workers traipsed in and out carrying toolkits, and an unearthly screaming was coming from Buttercup Ward. The allocated ‘Control and Restraint’ nurses were in another ward – so eventually, when AJ couldn’t stand the noise any more, he decided to go and attend to it himself. Moses was standing in the middle of his room. He was stripped naked from the waist down, and was hugging himself and crying – staring at the walls. Every inch had been scribbled on in red felt-tip. Hundreds and hundreds of words – on the walls, the skirting boards, even the ceiling.

  AJ had seen the worst and the weirdest in various institutions before Beechway, but this was a different level of bizarre. He was silent for a moment, gawping at the sheer extent of the damage.

  ‘Moses.’ He shook his head, half wanting to laugh, half to cry. ‘Moses, mate, what did you do this for?’

  ‘I didn�
��t.’

  ‘Have the doctors changed your meds?’ AJ studied Moses carefully. He couldn’t recall seeing a note in the care file – usually the nursing staff were given clear instructions if anything changed. Especially with medication. ‘Did you have something different last night? Yesterday?’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’

  ‘OK,’ AJ said patiently. The room smelled, the vaguest undertone of something like burning fish, so he cracked one of the window vents. He glanced down at the old guy’s genitalia, which dangled in front of his scrawny, grey-haired legs. ‘How about putting your drawers back on, mate? The doctors will need to check you over – you don’t want them seeing all your man stuff hanging out.’

  ‘I never took them off.’

  ‘Well, how about you just put them on anyway?’ He handed over the pyjama bottoms. ‘There you go.’

  While Moses was putting them on, AJ wandered around the room, his head canted on one side, reading the words:

  Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart.

  On other sections: If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.

  The lines were repeated dozens and dozens of times. They’d have to be scrubbed out, or painted over.

  ‘Moses,’ AJ said calmly, not drawing attention to the writing, ‘shall we go to breakfast?’ There was nothing in AJ’s long experience of psychiatric nursing more effective at changing the subject or distracting a patient than the mention of food. ‘They’re doing waffles and syrup for dessert.’

  Moses went along willingly to the dining room, though he had the appearance of someone moving further and further away from reality. The drugs, which he usually tolerated with few side effects, seemed to have started to work against him. There was a wet patch on his trousers and lines of drool hung like pendulous beads of pearls from his mouth. The other patients gave him a wide berth. He was withdrawn, standing quietly in the queue, one fist jammed into his right eye socket, which he kept rubbing at like crazy.