Poppet jc-6

by Mo Hayder

  Maybe the coroner is right. Zelda was young, but she was very overweight – over twenty stone – and inactive. Considered from that perspective, she was an unsurprising candidate. Enormously lazy, she was pushed everywhere in a wheelchair though she was quite capable of walking. Her clothing strained at the seams and the staff had to rub Vaseline into the folds on her legs to stop her getting sores. Her clothes consisted of seven red T-shirts and seven grey pairs of joggers and seven pairs of red socks. She would wear nothing else, even when she began to outgrow them and they’d been stitched so often they were more darning thread than fabric. Anything beyond eating and watching television was an abuse of Zelda’s rights. She was a habitual blamer of the system; the staff lost track of the times they were accused of abusing/molesting/raping her. No one argued with her, though many would have liked to. She could tip the mood of the entire ward on its head – everyone responded to her. Everyone walked on a knife-edge.

  AJ cannot, will not, ever pretend he liked Zelda. But as he gets to the end of the narrow country lane where he lives, he finds he can’t get rid of the image of her that night with her arms bloodied. All the rebellion taken out of her. And the words, ‘Someone … something.’

  He pulls on the handbrake and switches off the engine. Lets the silence leak in. There’s not much to look at here – only the spread of the Severn flood plain, Berkeley Castle, the glorious view of the decommissioned nuclear-power station to admire at sunset. No neighbours, just the cows. This is Eden Hole Cottages – the place he was raised – right out in the middle of nowhere. Brought up by his mother, Dolly Jessie LeGrande, and his aunt Patience Belle LeGrande – two sassy half-Jamaican women from Bristol. Mum has been dead three years, but Aunt Patience is still going strong. Stronger and stronger.

  ‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ Patience yells from the front room as he lets himself in. ‘Daybreak’s finished – it’s nearly time for damned Cash in the goddamned Attic.’

  Aunt Patience is so badly named. She yells at everyone, slams the phone down at the merest provocation and doesn’t believe in queues. She’s an irascible, tetchy, eccentric force of nature – she exudes the gravity of a planet; everything falls into her orbit. When she is in a bad mood objects fall off shelves and strangers’ babies cry; when she’s happy it’s like the sun has come out. People smile, couples kiss, and arguments cease. Some days he’d happily throttle Aunt Patience – put a pillow on her face and suffocate her. Put arsenic in her tea, sell tickets for people to watch. Except he knows that life would have been impossible without her. And without Stewart, his mongrel dog. Patience and Stewart are all he’s got left of his family.

  ‘Working late,’ he calls back. Stewart has raced out of the kitchen and is turning circles with excitement to see him. AJ hangs his jacket on the hook and bends to scratch the dog behind the ears. ‘Remember that thing called work? Things are hard at the unit.’ Beyond hard, he thinks, beyond hard. That word ‘delusions’ Melanie Arrow used keeps niggling at him. It’s as if she knows exactly what he dreamt last night – as if she’s worked out that he’s just as susceptible to the eeriness of Beechway as anyone else.

  ‘Come on, mate.’ He goes wearily into the living room with Stewart. Patience is sitting there, her feet up, her arms folded stubbornly, a cup of tea at her elbow. The room is so comfortable, a big warm fire and stacks of wood he’s cut piled up alongside. Squishy familiar sofas and chairs, hodge-podge patchwork cushions his mum made. Aunt Patience watches him sink into the settee, exhausted. She knows him so well. This is where he comes to re-set his head.

  ‘Breakfast’s in the oven,’ she says. Breakfast in this house is a moveable feast – it happens whenever AJ arrives home, regardless of what his shift is – two in the afternoon or two in the morning – food is there, ready for him. The kitchen is always filled with aromas that could make a grown man cry. ‘I cooked it and cooked it and I got to the place where I thought I was wasting my time.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have called.’

  ‘You sure you haven’t got yourself a lady friend, AJ?’ Even Aunt Patience calls him AJ these days. ‘Me and Stewart don’t mind – we’ll be fine on our own for a night or two.’

  ‘No lady friend.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Patience is always going on about him finding a girlfriend. Something about her obsession with it makes him wonder how she would actually react if he did. Whether she’d be more threatened than pleased by it.

  ‘I don’t know, Patience, but you must think I work at a dating agency. Or location-scouting for a lingerie photographer or something.’

  ‘I know where you work.’

  ‘Well then. It’s not exactly Girl Central.’

  Patience purses her lips. ‘If you’d rather be out there romancing a tree.’

  ‘Please.’ He folds his arms, looks at the ceiling. ‘I can’t take a tree-hugger lecture today.’

  For two years in a row he’s belonged to a club that makes cider. They brew and compete with each other to get the best cider possible. And it just so happens that one of the traditions associated with cider making is wassailing. It’s an old West Country tradition in which the trees are thanked for their year’s yield and asked to produce another yield in the coming year. Then there’s a bit of dancing and yelling to scare away bad spirits from the trees, and, because he and the lads thought it was a nice way to pass the time testing their brewing skills, Patience has got it into her head he’s a hippy, bypass-protesting eco-terrorist – prepared to spend his life in a culvert if it means saving a single crested newt. She’s got some neck giving him a hard time about it – like she can talk. If she’s not in the betting shop she’s out in the fields collecting sloe and damson for her big illegal stills in the garage, always rooting around for fruit to make her non-stop jams. The cottages have land – oh, land aplenty – but no garden whatsoever. Outside, it’s lines and lines of labelled furrows like Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit watercolours. Patience is in perpetual turmoil over what the deer and the muntjacs have eaten, and whether the rabbits are going to get at the vegetable patch this year. She knows exactly what food is in season at any given time – if he asked her right now she’d reel off a list: pumpkins, artichokes, medlars, cabbage. He never calls her a tree hugger.

  He gets up and goes through to the kitchen, where he gathers breakfast. Mountains of Patience’s scrambled egg and fennel. A pile of sautéed chestnut mushrooms. Three thick rashers of bacon. He adds tomato ketchup and a big wedge of home-made bread and sits at the table to eat.

  He was the one who found Zelda dead. It was just after he’d come on shift. She was lying on her back, her mouth open slightly as if she was snoring. Her arms were still bandaged from the self-harm episode twelve days before. AJ hasn’t told Patience about it; he doesn’t want to say the words: I found someone dead. Because he knows the sentence that comes after it would be: That’s the second time in three years. He and Patience talk about Mum, they have her picture everywhere, but they don’t really talk about how it happened.

  Out of the window, beyond the monster power-station towers, he can see the daylight catching the River Severn. Slowly, slowly, the unit slides away from him and he’s just a man again. An ordinary man in his ordinary kitchen, eating an ordinary breakfast at his ordinary table.

  The Man from the East

  THE LAND SURROUNDING Bristol’s so-called ‘feeder’ canal was once the city’s hub for coal-gas generation, an industry which left long tracts of the land unusable due to high levels of cyanide. In spite of an expensive urban-regeneration programme in the 1980s it remains a speckled and bitty landscape, home to derelict churches blitzed in the war, car showrooms and industrial units. The old bonded warehouses that line the canal have been largely bricked up. It is to this bleak corner of the city that the Major Crime Investigation Team has moved its operations, into a cast-concrete 1970s building which once served as offices for an electricity company.

  Caffery is one of the few people
in MCIT, aside from the superintendent, who has managed to carve out a personal space in the vast open-plan offices. His has a view of the Spine Road flyover and the cream-and-orange tower blocks at Barton Hill. The room contains a desk, chairs, a small red Ikea sofa, a coffee- and tea-making station with a tiny portable fridge that can barely accommodate a six-pack of beers and a carton of milk. There are no personal photographs or certificates or press clippings, just a large photograph of Misty Kitson and the filing cabinet with her case papers in it. He wheeled it in here when there wasn’t enough space in the incident room for other, more active operations. On the wall next to Misty’s photo three laminated OS maps bristle with pins of different colours. Each has a significance to him – locations connected to Misty’s disappearance. Other locations remain in his head. They are the ones that haven’t yet been brought to the attention of his colleagues.

  He spends the afternoon considering and analysing those pins – trying to get to a place where he can decide how to go forward. He’s had several months to think about this problem and he’s got a long-game walking around his head. A solution. But for the solution to work he needs the cooperation of one person. A woman – a fellow cop. The person he’s protecting. She is the only obstacle. And he still doesn’t know how to make that approach. It could go so badly wrong.

  He stands a pace away from Misty’s photograph, studies her, hoping for some guidance. Her face is a little bigger than life-size – her eyes are on the same level as his. She was a pretty girl. Whatever the cynics say about her they can’t take away her prettiness. He tries to get his eyes to focus on hers, but the spacing’s not right. The proportions are wrong. He stops trying and lowers his chin. Leans forward, his forehead resting against hers.

  A knock on the door. Caffery steps back from the picture. He moves to the desk and sits down. Groping for something to seem occupied with, he clicks the computer out of standby and drags the keyboard over.

  ‘Yes?’

  The door opens. The superintendent puts his head through the gap. ‘You free?’

  Caffery checks his watch. ‘Thought you’d gone home.’

  ‘You wish. We need a chat.’

  ‘A chat? An ominous chat?’

  ‘No – a spot of box-ticking.’ He holds up a file, gives it a shake. ‘Review team report.’

  Caffery gets up and pulls out a chair. The superintendent comes in and sits in it. He is a big sandy-haired man – an ex-CTIU terrorist-squad guy who got moved when something that no one speaks about happened with one of the unit’s weapons. He doesn’t beat about the bush.

  ‘So – the news is this. The search for our friend’ – he nods at Misty’s photo – ‘is going to be scaled down. It’s haemorrhaging money.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I can’t be wasting one of my few inspectors on something that’s going nowhere. I’m giving it to a DS. It’s not a category-A any more.’

  Caffery picks up a pen and slowly taps it on the table. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Here, let me just write that down so the review team can read it: DI Caffery apologizes but says we can’t do that.’

  ‘I mean it – you can’t move the case. I believe in finishing what I start.’

  ‘And the Home Secretary believes in deficit reduction. The HR department is on the Atkins diet – we are starving. We are lean. We cut corners, we axe, we tighten belts. It’s not a question of what you want me to do – it’s not even a question of what I want to do – it’s a question of what we’ve got to do. There’s been no new intel since the day she disappeared and now I need you somewhere else. You can spend tomorrow morning briefing one of the DSs and then you pick up the first job that comes through the door – I don’t care if it’s a category-A bells-and-whistles serial killer or a cat-D domestic. It’s yours.’

  ‘No. It’s exactly the wrong time to be doing this. Jacqui Kitson’s in town.’

  The superintendent pauses. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She’s got interviews lined up. The press are going to be crawling all over us. It’s not a good moment to be shuffling the case down the ranks. We need to address it. At least give the press something to chew on – draw attention away from her.’

  The superintendent considers this for a short while, scrutinizing Caffery’s face, trying to decide if he’s bluffing or not. The superintendent’s always struggled with this inspector who chose not to climb the ranks when everyone knew he could have. This city guy who walked in one day out of the East with a bunch of London ways and attitudes, the one who joined the unit in person, yet never really in his heart. Not a team player – a bad-tempered, lone wolf, who won’t take orders yet invariably manages to nail a case. He’s got the best detection rates in the unit, and that makes the superintendent furious and proud and pissed off and insecure all at once. He’s forever trying to find ways of reasserting his authority over Caffery.

  ‘It’s already decided. You’re SIO on the next operation. End of.’

  ‘Then I’ll do both jobs – the next job and keep Misty’s.’

  ‘I need my DI to be a hundred per cent there for whatever gets assigned to us.’

  ‘Watch me. I’ll deal with whatever comes through that door and I’ll get the press off our backs over Misty.’

  ‘What are you going to give them? Another reconstruction? Her walking down the steps of the clinic? Because that worked wonders last time. Lost count of the leads that gave us – not.’

  Caffery taps the pen a little harder. He’s been thinking about this all day; the superintendent is right, the reconstruction didn’t work. He’s sure the best way to keep the press happy, at the same time as moving his private long-game forward, is to instigate another search of the area she went missing. But if Misty’s disappearance loses its category-A status the open-ended budget will dry up.

  ‘Give me three more weeks. I’ll get you results.’

  The superintendent sighs, resigned. ‘OK – give the press what they need. But whatever job comes through the door gets your full attention too. Are you hearing me?’

  ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Jack,’ he mutters sarcastically. ‘Just love the way we’re always on the same wavelength.’

  Caffery doesn’t get up and hold the door when the superintendent leaves, instead he stays where he is, tapping his pen on the table. He senses Misty’s eyes on him, but he resists turning to face her.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he murmurs eventually. ‘It’s all in hand.’

  The Dream

  AT LUNCHTIME AJ gets a call on his mobile to say two night staff have gone sick again – that if there is to be any cover for that night it’ll have to be him. He has to change everything, all his plans. Instead of having twenty hours to adjust, he now has precisely six. He goes to bed with a mask strapped to his face. He falls asleep thinking about Zelda Lornton. He dreams, not about the unit, but about a place his dreams have taken him before. It’s a cramped, enclosed room or cave with shining, carved walls. Small faces seem to be sunk into the surfaces around him, watching him thoughtfully. But they’re not threatening faces. If anything, they are peaceful. Somehow he knows he is safe here – it’s a place where only good can happen. He gets thinner and thinner to the point he feels he’s going to stop breathing altogether and become so insubstantial that he will slip through a pinhole. He will emerge in a place of perpetual sun, where all the fruit on the trees is sweet and ripe, where the pathways are pale gold, the grass is green. He’s sure Mum is there, somewhere among the rolling hills.

  It’s always at the point where he is about to go through the pinhole that AJ wakes. He lies there, breathing hard, feeling something beautiful has just been snatched away from him.

  He’s at home. There is a very dim lit coming through the thin curtains. He rolls over and looks groggily at the clock. Five fifteen. Wearily he throws back the covers. Drops his feet on to the floor. He’s got to be at work by s
even.

  He showers, shaves and drinks lots of Patience’s coffee. Then he heads off, stopping in Thornbury to do some comfort shopping for the night – stuff like crisps and chocolate and little-kid treats. All the staff do it – easy comforts to push them through the tedium of a night in the unit. The shop’s got Forager’s Fayre jam on the shelf – it’s a locally made line and the only store-bought preserves Patience will allow in the house. She actually takes inspiration from Forager’s Fayre instead of scoffing at it. He throws a few jars into the basket to give to her in the morning.

  It’s an ordinary late-autumn evening in a rural town – a couple of express supermarkets still open, the pharmacy and a gift shop. The off-licence and the Indian and Chinese. But as he’s leaving the supermarket loaded down with bags, he notices something out of the ordinary. On the opposite side of the road two or three people have gathered around someone who is kneeling on the ground.

  The Good Samaritan in AJ died a death many moons ago – he’s so used to picking up messes in his job his instinct is to walk the other way – but he’s got basic first-aid skills, so morally he can’t pretend not to see. He crosses the road. As he gets nearer, he realizes the person on the pavement is a woman. She is apparently unhurt, apart from her hand – which she is pressing hard with a white handkerchief. She is wearing the white lace blouse she wore this morning, and lilac leather Mary Janes, from which rise her delicate ankles and her strong calves. He recognizes the calves instantly – God knows he’s studied them often enough. It’s Melanie Arrow. Ice Queen.