Poppet jc-6

by Mo Hayder

  Stewart knew. And now AJ does too.

  ‘Hello?’ Melanie repeats. ‘I said, shall we get on with it?’

  AJ has thrown the security room into uproar. The Big Lurch is staring at him, his eyes bulging, and Linda and her senior are having a long, angry conversation with the commander. She keeps shooting AJ hostile looks through the doorway. Eventually the conversation breaks up. Linda fires AJ a resentful scowl and steps aside, shaking her head. She tucks her shirt back into her belt, glancing around the room for some confirmation that this is all out of order. The commander comes into the pod and stands next to AJ, one hand on the desk, the other on the back of the chair, leaning in so he can speak to AJ in a low voice. ‘The language you were using wasn’t very helpful. I thought we’d reached an agreement about what you would and wouldn’t say?’

  ‘I promise – no more swearing. I promise.’

  ‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because this is your environment – please don’t let me down.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘One more chance.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘OK?’

  AJ nods.

  ‘Can we get this over with?’ Melanie repeats from the seclusion room. ‘Please?’

  The commander retreats to the doorway. AJ keeps him on the edge of his vision, where he can monitor him. He flicks the mic on again. ‘Yes,’ he says steadily. ‘We’ll get it over with, Melanie, when you tell the truth – the real truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You heard me. Explain why you’ve confessed all of a sudden.’

  ‘AJ,’ Melanie says, with a meaningful glance at Isaac. ‘Do you have to ask me that question? Isn’t it clear?’

  In the staffroom Linda has turned furiously – her hands out in disbelief. But the commander hasn’t moved – yet. His arms are folded, and he is watching AJ like a hawk.

  ‘Melanie,’ AJ says quickly, before the commander changes his mind, ‘what I’m confused about is why Isaac would think it in the first place. Why would Isaac come up with something like that?’

  ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Melanie’s eyes flicker from Isaac to the camera and back. She points her toes and knees together – like a child who doesn’t know the answer to a question.

  ‘Melanie?’

  ‘AJ, I’ve explained. Isaac thinks it because, naturally, I did it.’ Her chin is down, her eyes are locked on the camera, sending the clear message: This is a game we’re playing – now for God’s sake do your bit. ‘I did drive them to their deaths. I did hurt them and I did try to pass it off as self-harm and I did—’

  ‘Say it again,’ AJ cuts in. ‘But this time, don’t act it.’

  Melanie’s mouth opens in disbelief.

  ‘AJ,’ she says in a hurt tone. ‘Tell me – why aren’t you getting me out of here?’

  ‘Tell me,’ he replies. ‘Why are you being so theatrical?’

  She falters. Then her face hardens. Her feet turn outwards. She sits back and drops her hands at her sides. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘You’re insane. Is there anyone else there? Who’s in charge? Where’s Linda?’

  AJ glances at Linda, who glares at the commander. But he is standing with his back against the wall, one hand pinching his mouth ruminatively.

  ‘I want to know who’s in charge,’ Melanie says. ‘Put him on. Or get Linda back on.’

  The commander taps his lips thoughtfully, considering his response. At length he pushes himself from the wall. He comes to the desk, leans over to the mic. ‘Yes, Melanie. I’m the most senior police officer here, the commander on this incident. And,’ he continues before she can cut in, ‘I’m listening. It’s all yours.’

  ‘Wha—’

  ‘You heard him,’ says AJ. ‘Now answer my question.’

  There is a long pause. Melanie’s eyes seem to get bigger and bigger by the second. She cannot believe this is happening. Everyone in the control room is absolutely motionless. Linda’s egg timer turns itself over.

  Eventually Melanie smoothes her hair back from her face. She takes a deep breath. ‘Sometimes, AJ,’ she says, in a soft voice. ‘Sometimes when we lose someone – the way you lost your mother – sometimes we look around ourselves and all we can see is pain.’

  AJ goes cold. ‘This has nothing to do with my mother.’

  ‘Sometimes when people carry around the sort of pain and the guilt you’re feeling about your mother’s death, it can occasionally get transferred to others. So easy to assume that if we feel guilt, others must too. Maybe that guilt is there because, what … ? Because secretly you wanted her to die? Maybe you’d been a little careless with her medi—’

  ‘Melanie—’

  ‘Careless with her medication. Only you—’

  ‘Shut up, please.’

  ‘Only you know the truth, AJ. What actually happened. But one thing is sure: you’ve attached the guilt you feel about your mother’s death to me, which is why you’re doing this.’ She shakes her head, bites her lip. ‘I’m so sorry. I think you know what I’ve been trying to tell you for a while now.’

  AJ is silent for a moment – awestruck by her. She is good, but not quite good enough. She’s a cartoon villainess.

  ‘I’m not sure I do know,’ he says. ‘What have you been trying to tell me?’

  ‘I hate to say it like this – it’s too public. I can’t say something that hurtful in a place like this.’

  ‘Oh, I think you can.’

  She sighs. ‘OK – you’re doing this because you know it’s over between us. You know it was never going to be a reality. I mean, me? With you?’ She makes a face as if she’s seen something particularly noxious which, out of decency, she can’t specify. ‘Especially you know, the earth that didn’t move when we got between the sheets. I can sort of see your point of view – and I can understand why you’d hit back at me like this. It might seem, from an onlooker’s perspective, a particularly hurtful and childish way of doing it – but it’s probably understandable. You have your problems and I can’t pass judgement on that. Now,’ she says calmly, ‘please pass the microphone back to the inspector.’

  ‘I think I’ll decline that.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I don’t think you fucking will,’ she says. ‘Dick.’

  In the security pod an icy silence descends. Every person is transfixed by Melanie’s face. The hardening angles.

  AJ swallows. He’s almost got her. ‘Yes,’ he says softly. ‘I will.’

  There is a pause. Melanie breathes in and out. She is shaking. Eventually she says in a voice so low it’s barely audible, ‘You wet dick. Get the commander back on the microphone now.’

  In AJ’s holster his phone is ringing. He looks down. It’s Jack Caffery’s number flashing on and off.

  Timing, he thinks. Sometimes life is about little more than good timing.

  How to Make an Arrest

  BEECHWAY HIGH SECURE Unit is visible from miles away – blazing like a beacon with the blue emergency lights flashing on and off, strobing through the trees like lightning. As Caffery winds his way up the drive the usual faces emerge in his headlights: the divisional first-response cars, ambulances, three plain cars he takes to be local CID – and a support-unit armoured Sprinter van.

  He’s not sure what to expect. He has sent through a directive not to arrest Melanie Arrow until he arrives – he wants to be there when that happens. She’s currently in a containment cell.

  ‘Jack,’ a voice says as he comes up the drive. He stops. Leaning against the van at the top of the drive is Flea Marley. She has one foot up against the van and is holding coffee in a Thermos cup. She’s in personal protective gear – covered in radios and gizmos – and she looks tired. Her hair is scraped back off her face and she wears no make-up.

  He’s reached the end of her jerking him around. He thinks of Jon
athan Keay and his confusion and embarrassment that he’d protected Melanie so long. When is he, Caffery, going to wake up to his own blinkered breed of denial? He’s not going to talk to her. Instead he gives her his professional face.

  ‘Yeah, hi – how’s it looking up there? Easy?’

  She pauses. Caught by the hard edge in his voice. ‘Yeah – I … uh.’ She brushes a strand of hair from her face, using her hand to shield her expression. When she drops her hand the look has passed and her manner is all business. ‘Simples,’ she says lightly, gesturing at the hospital. ‘We’ve piled in here tooled up to the ears and it turns out to be nothing. Damp firework. The bronze and silver commanders are in there arguing the small print. Both hostage and the target are compliants, so it makes our job easier.’ She takes a deep, deep breath. ‘Before you go … ?’

  ‘Yes?’ he says impatiently. ‘What?’

  She’s silent for a moment. Then she lowers her face and sips from her Thermos cup. ‘Nothing,’ she mumbles. ‘Nothing. Good luck.’

  Caffery knows for sure that ‘nothing’ doesn’t mean ‘nothing’, but he’s a stubborn bastard when he wants to be. He’s not going to forget the way she’s jerked him around this week. He holds a hand up as goodbye, turns and heads up the drive. He doesn’t turn to look at her, though he assumes she’ll be watching him. Hating him.

  He goes through security – running the gauntlet of the local uniforms, the security staff puffing themselves up and acting big because the real cops are here. Some of the patients in one of the wards have come to the window to peer out – wondering what has come to pieces in the unit. He can hear them wailing and giggling.

  A face appears at the window, grinning at him. A white woman in her thirties who’s been eating something red and sticky which is now smeared across her face, giving her the appearance of a lioness after a kill. She lolls her tongue lasciviously at him. Makes a kissy face. He continues across the central domed area towards the place called Myrtle Ward, following the two uniformed cops who are escorting him.

  The place smells like a slaughterhouse toilet. The walls are covered in hand- and footprints, and every wall corner has a padded strip – like in a boxing ring. There’s an overlying fug of dismay and sadness and fear in the place. It makes him feel even emptier than he did before.

  Handel has been arrested – there was a scuffle, but he’s been moved to an empty bedroom on Myrtle where he is waiting for a consultant to give him a psychiatric evaluation before he can be interviewed and charged. Caffery looks through a window and sees him sitting on his bunk, his hands in cuffs. His nose has bled all over the baggy jeans he’s wearing. He’s refused a medical exam, insisting he’s OK.

  Melanie Arrow, meanwhile, is still in the seclusion room. Four members of Flea’s team stand at the door, the visors on their riot gear lifted. At their feet is a Stanley knife, bagged.

  ‘There’s blood,’ Caffery says, looking at it.

  ‘Yeah, but it hasn’t been used,’ replies one of the cops. ‘It just got in the way. Handel had a clout on the nose when we went in – there was a bit of claret floating around, got on to everything. Including this.’

  ‘How about her?’

  ‘Quiet. Compliant. She’s been asked if she wants to come out but says no, so I guess it’s an arrest sitch.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ All the way here Caffery’s been trying to work out what he can arrest her with. Usually in a case like this they’ll start with something easy to prove, then up the charge when the dust has settled and they’ve had time to think. He looks through the window. Melanie is sitting with her head lowered, as if she’s studying her hands. There are one or two spots of blood on her white blouse. More on the floor. It’s still a leap to believe what Jonathan Keay and AJ are telling him about her.

  He opens the door. She raises her eyes calmly.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Melanie.’

  ‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  She lifts her face – a bright smile pasted there. Her eyes are blank. ‘You’re so kind. But I think on this occasion I’ll decline, if it’s all the same to you. I think I’ll just go home now.’

  She gets to her feet and walks towards him as if it hasn’t even occurred to her that he might object. He puts a bit of width into his shoulders and moves his foot so he is blocking the door.

  She stops a pace away from him and drops her head again. Studying his feet – trying to decide how on earth this obstacle came to be in her path.

  ‘I’d rather you came to the station,’ Caffery says. ‘I don’t think home is a good idea – under the circumstances.’

  There’s a long pause. It is so quiet he can hear the breath whistling in and out of her nose. Then she says, in a voice straight from the Gloucester sink estate she grew up on: ‘And you don’t have any fucking right to be speaking to me like that.’

  ‘I’m being civil. Do you want to extend the same courtesy to me?’

  ‘This is my unit.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question. Are you going to be civil?’

  Melanie lifts her chin and spits at Caffery. It hits him on the eyebrow. Drips into his eye, stinging. He wants to wipe it off, but he doesn’t. He smiles.

  ‘Thank you for that. I’ve been trying to decide what I was going to arrest you for.’

  Teeth

  IT’S KIND OF fitting that Halloween is coming – the time when pumpkins get scooped out and displayed – because that’s the way AJ feels just now. Like someone has ladled out every piece of hope and light and love his body could contain. What’s left in the place he was holding Melanie is nothing.

  When Jack Caffery has accompanied her, cuffed and escorted by two cops, to a waiting car, the Big Lurch comes by and puts a hand on AJ’s arm. He squeezes it. Doesn’t say anything, but AJ gets the message. I understand. When you’re ready to talk, I’m here.

  AJ nods. Mutters a ‘thank you’. The Big Lurch wanders off, leaving AJ standing helplessly in the corridor – not knowing what to do with himself, wishing he could sit down somewhere. He thinks about calling Patience. Then he imagines telling her what has happened. She’ll be sympathetic, but there will be an under-note of I told you so in her voice – and he can’t face that. Instead he finds himself back in his office, holding the crude picture Zelda drew – the first thing that sent him on the hunt for Isaac. And now he sees, as he runs his fingers over it, that it has been added to after the original drawing. The paint is higher and fresher than the rest.

  He shakes his head. It’s like holding a kaleidoscope to your eye – growing more and more conscious of the intricate possibilities presented. Melanie – sweet, funny Melanie – is like a million different-coloured pieces of glass, reflecting back the colours the observer wants to see. She worked hard to get Handel’s tribunal to release him – hoping he’d walk out of the unit carrying all the stigma of The Maude with him. It never dawned on her that Isaac knew what she was doing.

  AJ goes back to Myrtle Ward. Down the corridor to the room where Isaac Handel is sitting, waiting for a psychiatric appraisal before he can be taken into custody. AJ nods at the cop sitting outside, unlocks the door and enters.

  Isaac is sitting dejectedly on the bed. He looks up when AJ comes in, but doesn’t speak. He is deathly pale. His jeans are covered in blood and there are twin lines of blood coming from his nostrils. He’s a mess. After they’ve cleaned him up, they’re going to put him through the wringer – drag him in front of a hundred courts and then the system is going to end up putting Handel back in a place just like Beechway. Except this time he’ll be at the head of the chain – in high-dependency Acute, with a very very long wait until he cycles back to discharge. Years, probably.

  AJ doesn’t speak at first. Instead he drops back against the wall, his chin lifted, and slides down until he’s sitting on the floor opposite Isaac. He rubs his face a few times. He’s known the guy for years and yet
never noticed that actually Isaac is the strangest guy on the planet. He’s tiny. The pudding-basin haircut is freaky and ridiculous. Unbelievable that AJ’s been so nervous about him.

  ‘Isaac,’ AJ says, ‘tell me something …’

  Isaac lifts his head. His eyes aren’t on AJ – they are somewhere on the ceiling, as if AJ’s voice is being projected from up there. His hands are clenched. There is so much blood. Everywhere.

  ‘Yes, AJ?’

  ‘The dolls,’ he says, almost not wanting to hear the answer. Because he thinks he can answer this himself. ‘Tell me about the poppets.’

  ‘I lost my poppets. I did lose them. From being bad.’

  ‘You were bad?’

  He nods. His face is so pale it’s almost blue. He is shivering. ‘And so she took them off of me. The Maude.’

  AJ stares at the side of Isaac’s face. He flashes back to Melanie’s bathroom. The broken panel. The missing bracelet. Could she have planted the notion of the broken panel as a way to focus AJ’s attention on the bath – just so he’d find the dolls in Handel’s room? The biblical scripts – she could have written them out herself. She’s been so clever pinning this on Isaac – looking back it’s been as dizzying as watching a circus acrobat.

  ‘OK. And something else. Why did you do what you did to your parents? To your mother and father?’

  Isaac answers the question as automatically as a child answering the question What’s one plus one? ‘I didn’t like them biting. Didn’t like their teeth.’

  ‘Biting?’

  ‘Uh hmmm,’ he says, nodding. ‘Used to get teeth when I didn’t play the games they wanted.’

  AJ is silent for a long time, picturing this. What other cruelty is locked away in Isaac’s head? He wants to say sorry – he wants to touch Isaac, but before he can, Isaac draws in a long, shaky breath. His voice is very small, very distant. ‘Something else, AJ,’ he murmurs. ‘One more thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s only going to last another few minutes. That’s all it’s going to last. You are going to think it’s finished then. But it hasn’t. The end isn’t here yet.’