Poppet

  ‘I know, I know all that – I know the logic – and I know the reality. I’m not saying I’m a born-again Christian or anything, but it’s made me a bit more … serious. Grown-up? That zip-up-and-move-on stuff? I just don’t do it any more. And it turns out that is the biggest turn-off for lots of girls. Turns out women are more ruthless than men when it comes to sex.’

  ‘Sluts,’ she says, her eyes hooded. ‘What awful, shallow little sluts.’

  He gives a sad laugh. ‘Yeah, well. I dunno why I had to come out with that speech now, I just did. That’s what I mean: I’m old-fashioned.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that.’ She stands and pushes him back on the sofa. Straddles him with both legs. ‘I thought you were going to tell me you couldn’t get it up.’

  Under the Flyover

  LIFE HAS JUST taken exactly the slow, unstoppable flip of fortune Caffery hoped it wouldn’t. He’s got it wrong – so wrong it is spectacular. He imagined Flea would at least recognize what it’s cost him to keep her secret, if not actually thank him and call him a hero. But life has a way of not behaving. And anyway, saints and heroes aren’t in the spectrum of colours Caffery plays. He has to look at things afresh.

  He drives back to the offices slowly, through the streets of Bristol, where the last wave of drinkers are trailing home. This town was built on the slave trade – all the spindly town houses grown up from the money of that trade, unabashed by their finery. He’s tired. He’s hungry and he wants a drink. He holds his pass to the automatic barrier and slides into the car park. The place is almost empty, just one or two Scientific Investigations vans and a scatter of vehicles belonging to civilian staff. He parks under the flyover, nose into the railway line, pulls on the handbrake. He’s about to get out when he senses he’s not alone here. There’s someone else.

  It’s Flea. Sitting in her Renault four lanes away, half concealed behind the green shipping storage container that sits amongst bushes in the middle of the car park.

  He gets out of his car, pulling on his jacket. He clicks closed his door and stands for a moment. Her silhouette doesn’t move. He approaches the Renault and tries the door – it’s open. He knows he’s supposed to get in, so that is what he does, no apologies or pretence. She is sitting with her elbows on the steering wheel, her face in her hands. She’s still wearing the waterproofs. Just the curve of her ear is visible, peeking out from her tangled hair.

  It smells in here of the polyurethane bags the support group use to carry their kits, and a faint, feminine perfume. Shampoo or body lotion. He waits.

  ‘OK,’ she says eventually. ‘OK,’ she says, not looking up at him. ‘I don’t think I have ever felt so ashamed in my life.’

  ‘You were protecting your brother. For some reason.’

  ‘Yes.’ She lets a small silence elapse. She taps her fingers on her forehead. ‘Will you tell me how you found out?’

  ‘Someone saw the accident.’

  ‘Someone who is … ? You?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘My friend.’

  A pause. He thinks she’s going to turn to him, but she doesn’t. ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’ Caffery considers the word ‘friend’. The old vagrant who saw Thom hit Misty? Is he strictly a friend? Caffery doesn’t know for sure. He gives a small cough. ‘He’s no one you need to worry about. I promise.’

  ‘You promise? And you tell the truth? Always?’

  ‘Not always. But in this case, yes. Trust me.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got a choice.’ She taps a little harder. ‘Next question – how long have you known?’

  ‘A year and a half. Give or take.’

  ‘And why haven’t you said anything?’

  ‘Some days I ask myself the same question.’

  ‘But you’ve said something now.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to recuperate – from the accident. And suddenly I’ve got sharks snapping at me.’

  ‘We all have sharks.’

  ‘Yes. But I’m tired of mine. And I need you to help me get rid of mine. See, though I don’t know how Thom talked you into it, I do know what you did with the body.’

  Her fingers stop tapping. She tilts her face sideways and one eye appears. It is smudged with the remnants of mascara. It blinks. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘I saw you, Flea. I saw what you did. Elf’s Grotto. The quarry. I saw you putting the body in the water.’

  She raises her face and stares at him, her mouth a little open. He can almost feel the heat of her brain labouring, the glucose it is eating up to get all the information into the right slots. Absorbing that comment.

  ‘It’s true. I’m sorry.’

  Her mouth moves soundlessly. Then she drops her head, shakes it. ‘I can’t believe this,’ she says. ‘You know everything? You’ve known all about me, all about Thom and you’ve known all this time. And you’ve kept it a secret? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe the same reason you covered for Thom.’

  She starts to answer, but seems to think better of it. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if she’s trying to blot an image out. She’s small and delicate compared to the men in her unit – it’s difficult to picture what she did with the body. If he hadn’t witnessed it, hiding himself in the darkness, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible. But it happened. He’s checked the quarry schematics and worked out that Misty could be almost sixty metres underwater at the bottom of the quarry. The thought makes him cold – the quarry is one of the nastiest, freakiest places he’s ever been. Isolated, disused and flooded, it’s got a mean, supernatural drag to it. A suicide mecca – he’s lost count of the number of people who’ve ended their lives there. Sometimes the body has come back, sometimes not.

  ‘If they ever drained that place,’ he says, ‘it would be like wading into hell.’

  ‘Yes. But if they did, they still wouldn’t find Misty.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She’s not at the bottom of the quarry.’

  Caffery lowers his chin and scrutinizes her. This doesn’t click with what he saw. Not at all. ‘You took her into the quarry. I saw you – you did something with her.’

  ‘Yeah – I did something. Certainly I did something.’ Flea pulls her jacket tight around her, sniffs. ‘Are you going to tell anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why the search? You ordered it – you must be doing it for a reason.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a … a way for us to sort it all – make it go away. I’ve thought about it from every single angle. It can’t go wrong.’

  ‘Nothing can go wrong now if we leave it as it is. She’ll never be found. I might be ashamed but I can at least sleep easy at night.’

  Caffery stares out of the window. The rust stains on the flyover struts, the flickering of headlights on the highway up there. He feels a weight of water – a million tonnes of it. A freezing black quarry, a giant ice heart. He doesn’t believe Flea when she says she sleeps easy at night.

  ‘I need her remains back.’

  A sharp intake of breath. She turns and stares at him. ‘I’m sorry. Did you just say what I think you just said?’

  ‘For it to work, I need whatever is left of her. I can’t do that – only you can. And …’ He trails off. Her eyes are so frozen with shock he knows he’s gone too far. He’s going to lose her. He gives a small, embarrassed cough. ‘Tell you what – I’m going to leave this now. Let you sleep on it.’

  She doesn’t answer. Just continues staring.

  ‘Are you going to be all right?’

  She gives him a tight, barely controlled nod. ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘Do you want some coffee? A drink?’

  ‘No thank you. I think I’d better go home.’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘OK.’

  He waits for a little longer, wondering whether to say anything else, but when she doesn’t speak or move he gets out. Zips up his jacket. He watches her start
the engine and swing the Renault out of the car park. It pulls out into the feeder road and soon is swallowed up amongst the buildings. He waits for almost five minutes before he realizes she’s not going to come back.

  He turns his collar up and heads back to the offices.

  Frost

  AJ DREAMS ABOUT the cave again. And this time there’s a woman there too. She is standing at the entrance to the cave, but her face is turned away. He thinks it’s Melanie. He calls her, but she doesn’t respond. Melanie? This time she stirs a little, but just as it seems she’s going to turn, the dream dies and crumbles. He wakes, reaching into the cold air.

  It takes him a moment or two to remember he’s in Melanie’s bedroom in Stroud. And then he realizes she’s awake too – sitting next to him. The curtains are open and the moonlight streams through the window, lighting her blue and almost supernatural.

  She is bathed in sweat, staring in disbelief at the window.

  ‘Melanie?’ He props himself up on his elbows. ‘Melanie? What’s up?’

  She points at the window in a trance. He can’t tell if she’s awake or asleep. ‘It was wearing a—’ She bites the sentence in half. Shakes her head and holds her knuckles up to her forehead. ‘No. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Melanie?’ He puts his hand on her back, leans forward a little to get a view out of the window. He sees the trees beyond the garden moving slightly in the moonlight. ‘What do you think you saw?’

  ‘Nothing. I was … I don’t know.’ She gives a long shudder. ‘I must have been dreaming.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you think you saw?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all – I just—’

  ‘Just?’

  She swings her legs out of bed, grabs a pillow to hold in front of her naked body, and goes to the window. AJ gets out and comes to stand next to her, looking over her shoulder at the garden. The ground is frosty – and a clear dark slash extends from the treeline to about halfway down the garden. Exactly as if someone has walked into the garden, stopped to look up at the bedroom window, then turned and gone back the way they’ve come.

  He snatches up his T-shirt and jeans and begins pulling them on.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Someone’s out there.’

  ‘No – there’s no one there. I dreamt it.’ She sounds panicked. She is shaking, bewildered. ‘AJ – don’t go outside – please don’t.’

  ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘Please. I’m scared now.’

  ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘Oh God.’ Moving clumsily, she goes to a chest of drawers and rummages through, dropping things in her hurry. She pulls out a torch. It’s big and reassuringly heavy. He weighs it steadily in both hands.

  ‘That’ll do.’

  He goes down the stairs. She comes trotting behind him, pulling on a kimono. ‘There’s no one there – there can’t be, please stay in here with me.’

  The back door is closed and when he tries it he finds it’s unlocked.

  ‘Shit,’ she hisses, tying the belt of the kimono. ‘I forget to lock it – I never think about it. This is such a safe area.’ She cranes her neck to see past him into the garden. ‘Don’t go out – please. Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Put some shoes on.’

  She obeys, jamming her feet into wellingtons. He pulls on his shoes – no socks – and together they step outside, closing the door behind them with a soft click.

  It’s very quiet. Distant traffic sounds from the town float over the roof from behind them, but from the direction of the garden is nothing but the slight rustle of wind in the branches. They stand on the doorstep, listening to the night, hardly breathing. Overhead a security light has come on, but it isn’t strong enough to reach the front of the garden.

  AJ switches on the torch. It’s got a strong beam that illuminates the trees down there.

  ‘There’s no fence,’ Melanie whispers. ‘The builders walked off site – never finished the garden.’

  Nothing in the trees is moving – there’s no eye gleam, nothing suspicious. AJ runs the beam into the grass. He takes a few steps into the garden – the frosty ground crunches underfoot. He stops at the place the dark slash from the woods finishes and shines the torch at his feet. Nothing. He’s not a tracker – some Navajo or scout – he’s only pretending to know what he’s looking for. A ghostly blur on his imagination – a nightgown and a patter of small feet. More likely an animal. He thinks about the muntjac that wander from the forests through Patience’s lettuce rows. Better to fix that in his thoughts than anything else.

  ‘Anyone there?’ he calls into the trees. ‘Something you want?’

  Silence.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ Melanie hisses. She’s trembling now. ‘I want to go back in.’

  AJ stands a few minutes more – trying to put some width into his silhouette. It’s probably nothing, but if there is someone wandering around in the trees he wants them to know there’s a man here. But there’s still no sound. Eventually he switches off the torch and silently re-enters the house. Melanie locks and bolts the door. They check all the windows, then, shivering and cold, they go back to bed.

  They lie together trying to get warm, but Melanie is strange. She turns away from him and although she is silent he knows, without looking at her, that she’s wide awake, not likely to go to sleep. ‘Hey,’ he whispers. ‘What did you see? What did you think it was?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t see anything. I was dreaming.’

  ‘What did you dream?’

  ‘I don’t even remember now. Something – stupid.’

  They lapse into silence. A long time passes and AJ is just falling off to sleep again when Melanie says suddenly, ‘AJ?’

  ‘Mmmmm?’

  ‘Do you believe that if you worry about something long enough you can make yourself dream about it? Or even hallucinate it?’

  ‘Of course. I’d say it’s very likely. What were you worrying about so much that you dreamt about it?’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t know – can’t remember.’ She gives a big fake yawn. ‘Night night, AJ. Night night.’

  Someone Must Know Something

  FLEA GETS TO bed at two but doesn’t sleep until four. She leaves the TV on for company, playing silently in the corner. It’s a bad night; she turns and fidgets and cannot get comfortable. From time to time she half wakes – thinking someone has walked into the room. Sometimes it’s her parents, sometimes it’s Jack Caffery. Once she sits up straight and sees, reflected in the TV screen, a skull – half woman, half horse, the teeth long in the front, gums drawn up. Her hair is blonde and her eye sockets are empty.

  Misty? she says.

  Yeah, hi, what? she says. Have you got a couple of wraps for me, or is that too much to ask? And why did you put me there? They’ll find me – he’ll find me if you don’t do it for him.

  Flea reaches out her hand, but the face dissolves and she’s lying on her bed, her heart carumph-carumphing along in her chest. She stares at the TV, still working away in silence. Fake tans and strutting, angry women in big heels. A woman appears, perched, solemn-faced, on a blue sofa. Short skirt, tanned knees together, turned demurely to face the presenter, who has adopted a serious, sympathetic expression. Flea fumbles for the remote. Turns the volume up.

  ‘… someone must know something,’ says Jacqui Kitson. ‘Someone must know where she is …’

  Flea hits the off button. The TV whines and dies. She rests her elbows on her knees, uses her thumbs to massage her temples. Did last night really happen? Really and truly? Jack says he saw her at the quarry. It has to be true. There’s no other way he could have known.

  Outside the window the breaking sun creeps up the long scrape of the valley. The lights of the city of Bath wink out one by one. The city is slowly raising itself out of the monochrome mist. She drags herself out of bed, pads to the bathroom, along the corridor with its wonky floors. On the left is the room where she stores the cardb
oard boxes that have been taped down. This straggly old house is home – the place she grew up. Mum and Dad are dead – a scuba-diving accident years ago – and the house is so empty without them. A shell. Recently she’s finally got round to packing away their belongings. All part of her healing process – a kind of fartlekking for the spirit. The way she can go on flying.

  She cleans her teeth, splashes her face and gets straight into her running gear, sitting on the edge of the bath to lace the trainers. She can’t do what Caffery wants – because it means opening boxed thoughts that have been packed away as neatly as the crates in the other room – stored in the dark edges of her memory. She’s got to keep herself together. If she thinks about it, or lets it in, it’s going to cut her down at the knees. Reduce her to nothing. And that will do no one any good. Not her, not Caffery. Not Jacqui Kitson.

  She jumps up, trots fiercely down the stairs.

  You can put things back in a box. Yes, from time to time they might pop out and wriggle, but you can make them go back if you try hard enough. The idea is to keep moving. Don’t look down. She gets her running jacket and her keys from the hook. Opens the door to the freezing mist.

  The Bracelet

  THE NEXT MORNING Melanie and AJ make an unspoken pact to brush off what happened in the night. To make light of it. She cracks a bad joke about ghosts. He gives a small laugh, ricochets a joke back – something about stalkers, and about how she’s going to turn into one of the patients and wander around with dinner down her clothes and drool coming uncontrollably out of her mouth. She tickles him, and swooshes her hair over his chest. He makes play grabs for her breasts, and she curls up, squealing with laughter.

  They make love with the curtains wide open. The bare branches in the forest at the bottom of the garden are frosted and motionless. Afterwards she lies on her front, her head resting on her arms, and talks.

  It turns out Melanie has her own bundle of sensitivities and inadequacies. It’s not only about losing her dad, it’s more a case of the girl losing the guy from her dedication to the job. In the fallout from the Thatcher Years Melanie’s unit in Gloucester got closed and she was moved around the country. She fetched up in Rotherham, where she climbed the ranks to ward manager, then director. Five years ago the hospital closed and she and Jonathan Keay both relocated to Beechway. In those days Keay and Melanie were just friends; in fact, she was married to someone else, a tax lawyer from Oldham. The marriage lasted ten months into her time at Beechway – roughly the time AJ arrived at the unit – when her husband decided she was more dedicated to the unit than to cooking for him and filed for divorce.