Puppet: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

by Mark Sennen

  ‘Difficult? Of course it’s fucking difficult!’ Francis raised the knife and thrust it towards Savage, lunging at her across the table. ‘It’d be so much easier for me to slice you up and be done with it all.’

  ‘As you said, Zac, you never killed anyone. Not a good idea to start now.’

  ‘Right.’ The word was flat, without emotion, as if there wasn’t much to be said about it either way.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down and I can take a statement? Then I’ll be finished.’ Savage felt her heart thumping but tried to act calm. ‘If we can sort this out, there’s no harm done, OK?’

  Francis didn’t answer, but his fingers tightened on the handle of the knife. There was a slight shake, amplified at the end, so the tip flicked back and forth. Savage braced herself. She could dive for the floor or make a dash to the door. Not good odds either way. She wished she had some kind of weapon, but the only objects on the table were a cereal bowl with a spoon jutting from it and a cork placemat.

  ‘Zac…’

  Francis moved closer, but as Savage made to throw herself down, there was a sound from the corridor, and the front door clattered open, somebody stomping in.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ A bulk of a man came lumbering into the kitchen. ‘You haven’t done the fucking washing up, Zac, you lazy c—’ He stopped mid-sentence when he saw Savage. Smiled. ‘Who’s the pretty lady friend?’

  ‘She’s police.’ Francis turned and the knife clattered back on the drainer. ‘And she’s just leaving.’

  ‘Police?’ the man said. ‘As if my day wasn’t going bad enough already.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch, Mr Francis.’ Savage edged past the table, aiming for the door. ‘To check what you told me.’

  She left the kitchen and went down the hallway to the front door. She clicked the latch, let herself out, and walked to the gate. This time, when she turned back, there was no sign of Francis at the window.

  ***

  Savage drove to the village pub. Inside there was a solitary lunchtime visitor in the dining room, but when asked about the kitchen staff rota, the barman wasn’t much help.

  ‘Sorry, love, I wouldn’t have a clue. Jeff deals with the restaurant side of the business.’

  It turned out that Jeff, the landlord, was away for the day at a publicans’ convention in Bristol. Savage left a card and drove back to Plymouth.

  ‘How did you get on with Francis?’ Collier wanted to know.

  She told him about Francis’s behaviour, the tension and aggression, the mess in the kitchen.

  ‘It was a different Francis,’ she said. ‘As if something’s happened to him.’

  ‘So he’s back in the picture?’

  ‘Possibly. There’s still the matter of the hostel, though. If there isn’t a mistake in the records back on the day Abigail went missing from God’s Haven, then he couldn’t have killed her.’

  ‘But the Smeeton and Faye murders?’ Collier had uncapped one of his special markers. Big, red, and used for the most critical annotations to the whiteboard. ‘Would he give us any joy if we brought him in and put him under a little pressure?’

  Savage didn’t want to disappoint Collier, but she couldn’t bring herself to commit. ‘Something’s not quite right. We need to check his alibi for Friday night to see if he could have killed Faye.’

  ‘Oh.’ Collier lowered the marker. ‘In that case, your next job is to research puppets in general. We need more background information if we’re to fathom out the letter writer and his motives.’

  ‘What about Thomas Raymond?’ Savage really didn’t want to spend the afternoon hunched behind a monitor screen.

  ‘Darius and Patrick will visit him tomorrow. We should have the results of the forensics on the letters in the morning, and once we do, a sample of Raymond’s writing may well seal the deal.’ Collier looked wistfully at an empty workstation. ‘Until then…’

  ***

  Savage took lunch and then returned to the crime suite and logged into a terminal. As she browsed through an online website dedicated to the history of puppets, she began to feel as if she was an expert on the Antiques Roadshow rather than a detective on a murder investigation.

  She knew why Collier had given her the job, and it wasn’t because of her superior deductive powers. She guessed Hardin wanted her out the way and had fired down an order. Francis was a longshot, leave it to Savage. Researching puppets on the web wasn’t going to make any waves, give the job to Savage. She could even imagine the language the DSupt had used: Get the bloody woman doing something that can’t cause any more trouble. Well, making trouble was what she did best, and it usually produced results. Hardin appeared to be more concerned with the outward appearance of the investigation rather than its inward progress to a conclusion.

  She bent to the keyboard and tapped a few keys. More puppets. On sticks. With strings. As gloves. Life-sized. From Spain, Paraguay, India, Greenland. Owned by paupers and peasants and kings and queens. Several millennia old or bang up-to-date animatronic wonders. Didn’t one of her kids have a puppet? Yes, somewhere in the back of a cupboard was a tangle of threads wrapped round a dog made from wood. White with black spots. A dalmatian. Strings for its legs and head and tail. Samantha had played with it endlessly for about a week and never touched the thing again.

  For a moment, Savage nearly let melancholy overcome her before pulling herself together. She was getting bogged down and needed help. She remembered something she’d seen on the local TV news about the museum in Plymouth. Recently it had been given a multi-million-pound makeover and renamed as The Box. The news item had flashed through a quick tour of exhibits, and one had been a selection of toys children had played with during the Second World War. No puppets, but the curator had seemed knowledgeable. Perhaps he might know something about a local connection to the Mézáros puppets. It was worth a try since the web was leading nowhere.

  An hour later and Savage was in a tiny office in the depths of the museum talking to Ernest Gillan, an intent young man with a first name from another era that suited his role as a curator. He wore large glasses as thick as magnifiers and had a shaven head. A diamond stud sparkled in one earlobe, and there was a small tattoo on his right forearm. He spoke ten to the dozen as if all the knowledge he’d accumulated needed to come out as quickly as possible.

  ‘Puppets, right?’ Gillan said as Savage took a seat on the far side of his cluttered desk. ‘Marionettes. Dolls. Figurines. Important culturally, at least before movie animation came along. You see, without an elaborate and expensive costume, puppets are the only way to bring to life something otherworldly or grotesque or spectacular. A sculpture or painting is static and inert, but a puppet moves.’

  Gillan continued, going into a detailed history and geography of puppets and branching off into how toys spoke across the generations and cultures. Savage let him continue and tried not to switch off. Finally, he ran out of wind.

  ‘So there we are.’ Gillan peered through his thick lenses. ‘And your interest is what?’

  ‘This.’ Savage brought out photographs of the three puppets. ‘Anything you can tell me would be helpful.’

  ‘Ah, from the great Mézáros.’ Gillan removed his glasses and held up each picture in turn.

  ‘You recognise them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We found them close to three crime scenes.’

  ‘Left for anyone to come across?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Astonishing. Like dropping your wallet on the pavement and walking away.’

  ‘They’re that special?’

  ‘Very rare. He only made a few hundred in his lifetime, and there aren’t many left. I suspect his creations sat in boxes in lofts and, following a bereavement, were thrown away by relatives not realising their true worth.’

  ‘This really is the Antiques Roadshow,’ Savage said quietly.

  ‘Oh no, those clowns wouldn’t realise the value of a Mézáros. Not unless they had local knowledge.’

>   ‘Of Hungary?’

  ‘Mézáros was Hungarian, yes. However, his family were Jewish and fled from the Nazis to Spain. Jakab would have been in his twenties then and helping out in his father’s furniture-making business.’

  ‘So that’s how he became skilled in woodworking?’

  ‘Yes, but it was too boring and unromantic for the young Mézáros, so he made toys on the side. At some point, a friend asked him to make a puppet, and that’s when it all started. He began to receive orders from wealthy folk who wanted an exquisite toy for their children. Soon though, the puppets began to be seen as art objects because of their beauty and Mézáros’s sales pitch. You see, when he demonstrated a puppet, it was usually an instant sell since he was so skilful at operating them that emotion overcame the buyers.’

  ‘And in the end, emotion overcame him?’

  ‘It did. Genius, sadness and tragedy often go together. Mézáros became too involved in his creations, and each one took longer and longer to make. That led to the failure of his business and destitution. Ultimately, he went mad, believing that he had to give away part of his soul to make each puppet. He convinced himself there was nothing left of Jakab Mézáros, and he was only a puppet himself.’

  ‘An awful story.’

  ‘Yes, but really only of interest to locals. I hope to change all that by putting on a little exhibition here in Plymouth. Visitors to the city might see we have a bit more history than Drake and the Pilgrim Fathers, important though they are.’

  ‘An exhibition at the museum? I don’t understand?’

  ‘But isn’t that why you’ve come to see me? About Mézáros’s local connections?’

  ‘Jakab Mézáros was here in Plymouth?’

  ‘Of course. The family came on a boat from Spain, having to flee once more, this time to escape Franco’s death squads. Mézáros carried on his work right here in the city until it all went wrong for him.’ Gillan peered through his glasses as if he was having trouble understanding how stupid Savage was. He paused before spelling it out for her. ‘I saw you on the news with Marcus Clent. I guessed one of the puppets was found at the scene of that poor girl’s murder, close to Clent’s community.’

  ‘God’s Haven.’

  ‘Or Penn Haven as the place was known when it was an asylum, back when Jakab Mézáros was incarcerated within its walls.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Savage said.

  ***

  When she returned to the station, she kept the information about Mézáros to herself. To her mind, the evidence Hardin had asked for was stacking up against Marcus Clent. She just needed a couple of pieces of the jigsaw to fall into place. Then Hardin, Heldon, hell or high water, she’d take Clent down.

  At close of play, Collier came across.

  ‘Anything on those puppets yet?’ he said.

  ‘Not a lot.’ Savage lowered her head and tried to make the lie appear as if she was simply unenthusiastic. ‘I’ll get back to it tomorrow.’

  At home, the house felt empty. Pete was out teaching an RYA Yachtmaster evening class, and Jamie was at a friend’s movie/pizza birthday party. Samantha was in her room listening to music while chatting to a friend on her phone. When Savage popped her head round the door, the best her daughter could manage was a reluctant ‘hi, mum,’ along with a wave of a hand shushing her out. Savage quietly closed the door and went back downstairs. She made herself a quick bowl of pasta and took it and a glass of wine to the living room to watch the news.

  A terrorist bomb in Paris was the lead story, followed by the ongoing shenanigans of a cabinet minister supposedly loyal to the prime minister, but in reality after the top job. For the third item, the screen changed to a vista of the Tamar Bridge. At the bottom, the headline asked whether the police were engaged in the deliberate persecution of religious groups. A montage of images replayed the story, and then the slimy face of Marcus Clent filled the screen.

  ‘Bastard,’ Savage said before taking a sip of her wine.

  The interview with Clent was one-sided, the reporter unwilling to even attempt to take an opposing viewpoint. Bloody political correctness, Savage felt. She wished she’d been able to shout over the reporter’s shoulder and ask Clent about forced marriage to three young girls. And what about the murder of Abigail Duffy? Her death wasn’t even mentioned in passing.

  She blipped the TV off and took another sip of wine. Wondered when Pete would be home. Sometimes he stopped off for a drink with some of his pupils. Yottie talk. Tactics for this year’s Eddystone race. Someone’s tale of a luxury charter holiday abroad. The latest boat review in a sailing mag, the consensus being that none of them would ever be able to afford to buy such a yacht. She smiled to herself. Lads. Forty-year-old lads, true, but still boys at heart. She necked the rest of the wine and took her empty pasta plate and the glass to the kitchen.

  After putting the crockery in the dishwasher, she went to the patio door and stared out at the deck. Jamie had left his bike leaning against the steps, and there was the possibility of rain. She’d go outside and put it away, and while she was there, stroll down to the bottom of the garden and look out across Plymouth Sound. She slid open the door and stepped out onto the deck. The lights of the city looked beautiful in the dusk, and with the slick black water reflecting a crescent moon, the scene might have been from somewhere far more exciting: Sydney, New York, Shanghai.

  She moved to the bike and was about to push it round to the shed at the side of the house when she spotted something on the lawn. Another one of Jamie’s toys. She shook her head. She’d have to have a word with him about caring for his possessions. She left the bike and crossed the lawn, bending to pick up the…

  …puppet.

  She looked down at the round wooden head and thin, spindly limbs. The tangle of strings leading to a simple cross of wood. A piece of newspaper had been wrapped around the waist, flared out and fashioned into an impromptu skirt. On the puppet’s chest, there was a small cut-out of silver paper in the shape of a star, something like a sheriff’s badge or the shield an American police officer might wear. Savage bent and read part of the newspaper print. A headline culled from the local paper: Cop Rot. Below was the byline: Dan Phillips.

  She bent and looped a finger under one string and lifted the puppet. She walked back to the house, and as she climbed the steps to the deck, the light from the kitchen splashed out. The puppet, pale in the moonlight, now gained colour. She entered the house and gently lowered it onto the kitchen table, realising something red and viscous was smeared across the face.

  She stared down. Took in the clothing again. The cop badge. The red paint. This wasn’t like the other Mézáros puppets; this was something different. She lifted one of the strings, turning the puppet’s head, and there on the back, scratched into the wood, was the letter C.

  Chapter 25

  Dear Charlotte

  I hope you got my present what I left on your lawn. It was meant to scare you and make you stop trying to catch me. I will need to do things to you otherwise and I will not really enjoy it. I hope you understand I am not killing for fun like some crazy people do. I do it because I have been told to and I have no choice.

  It would be better for everyone if you left me alone but I understand that might not be possible because I am going to have to do another girl (I mean we since my friend still is helping me). I promise I will not kill again after that. I guess you might not believe me but you should.

  Did you ever play that game when you were a child? The one where you are blindfolded and people call out hotter or colder if you get near something? Well right now I am shouting COLDER because you are looking in the wrong place for me. I will not tell you where to look but I will say COLDER all the time you are wrong.

  Of course you should not be looking at all if you are thinking about the present I gave you but I guess you are a stubborn person and I think a bit cruel as well since I saw you push that reporter man and you hit Mr Marcus Clent. I wonder if you cut the legs off frogs when
you were young? If you did perhaps we could talk about that if we ever meet.

  Your friend

  THE PUPPET

  PS I still think you are pretty even if you are naughty for 1. looking for me and 2. cruel for pushing people.

  PPS Even though you are pretty it will not stop me doing things to you if I have to.

  Chapter 26

  She didn’t sleep well, waking several times to the noise of boards creaking, a clatter from downstairs, the front door mysteriously clicking shut. There were rational explanations to each sound: Jamie wandering to the toilet, Samantha making herself a midnight snack, her husband remembering he’d left his phone in the car and deciding to retrieve it at three in the morning.

  ‘You OK?’ Pete asked when she came down to breakfast, looking bleary-eyed.

  ‘Sure.’ Savage delved into a cupboard, hiding her face so Pete wouldn’t see she was lying. She hadn’t told him about the puppet on the lawn when he’d come home because he’d only have worried. ‘I’ll be fine once I’ve caught Abigail’s killer.’

  ‘And are you going to catch him?’

  ‘Do you need to ask?’

  ‘I have a lot of faith in you, so not really.’ Pete returned his attention to the newspaper he was reading. ‘But you might struggle if it’s got anything to do with the God’s Haven lot.’

  Savage peered over. The headline didn’t look good: Police Admit to Religious Persecution. ‘That’s crap.’

  ‘Maria Heldon has done a mea culpa. She concedes that prejudice is endemic in the Devon and Cornwall force.’ Pete tapped below the headline where there was a picture of Savage on the bridge pushing Clent to the ground. ‘And you’ve got to acknowledge it’s not a good look.’

  ‘Bloody hell, that’s so out of context. Clent is a serial abuser, and I was trying to stop him from getting close to the Anderson family.’

  ‘You say that and I believe you. I bet CC Heldon has suspicions herself, but she dare not act on them. She’s fallen prey to the ideological capture of the woke brigade.’