Poppet (9 page)

Moses nods. He takes a long shaky breath, lets it all out.

‘Don’t make me say what’s scary, Mr AJ, or mention that name. I bin told I ain’t supposed to say it so I ain’t even going to whisper it and you’ll excuse me for that, but though you are my deep and most respectful of friends, I am just going to keep my piehole shut at this moment in time.’

He nods to himself, as if to confirm those were the exact words he meant to use. He says nothing more. The doctors spent a long time putting Moses back together, working on his eye implant, but if you know what to look for you can still see his face is misshapen. What actually happened to Moses that night? AJ wonders. They can go on putting The Maude down to hallucinations and fantasy, but
something
happened that night. And whatever it was was powerful enough to make Moses gouge out his own eye.

An Apple Tree

WHEN SUKI HAS
been dead for so long that she’s cold, Penny starts to move. Outside, everything is ready – she has lived with herself for forty-two years and she knows herself well enough to have already prepared what she’s going to do next. She’s been out already this morning and dug the hole. It’s under the apple tree, the one that Suki as a baby – not much bigger than a guinea pig – used to chew at. Growling and leaping at it. Her own play-monster.

Dressed in the same sweater and skirt and socks she’s been wearing for almost two days, Penny carries the dog out into the main part of the mill – her home for the last sixteen years. The lights are all low, just a faint glow from the big log burner in the centre of the floor. Even wrapped in the old chewed blanket she used to drag around the house, there’s nothing of Suki – she’s no heavier than a feather.

At the back door Penny realizes she needs her boots on. Instead of putting Suki down on the mat – she doesn’t think she can bear that – she leans her shoulder against the door frame and jams her feet into the wellies, wriggling her toes around. It’s sort of comic, this middle-aged woman with all her scarves and her coloured hair and her jingly bracelets, standing there like a drunk in the doorway with a dead pet in her arms. She has to smile. Suki would be laughing. Wherever she is now. Up in the dark slipstreams.

It’s very, very dark. Very cold. Her breath is in the air. Winter is moving in. It has moved in. She gets to the bottom of the garden, in spite of all the slippery terraces. It would be better to be drunk or stoned or high, but there hasn’t been the chance. It would be better to have washed and changed – she’d like to feel cleaner and prettier for something this important, but she’s not young and no one is going to watch.

She crouches and lowers Suki into the hole. She’s lined it with dried flowers and fruit and blankets and Suki’s tennis ball – covered in dog spit and hair. The dog seems to sigh as her body settles, as if this is a relief. Penny moves her hands out from under the blanket – takes a step back, closes her eyes and rests her hands in a light clasp at her waist. She drops her face and tries to be respectful. She tries to wish good things and think about where Suki is going to go, but she can’t do it, so in the end she just takes the shovel and pushes frozen earth into the hole. Quickly, before she can change her mind.

Power Cuts

SOMETHING IS BOTHERING
AJ, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Instead of finishing his walk of the wards he goes hunting down the Big Lurch. He has to go into the nurses’ station and out into the admin block and through all the toilets and the kitchens until he finds him in the security guards’ control room – a giant futuristic glass pod in the reception area of the unit. He is sitting on a swivel seat in front of a bank of monitors. His feet are up and his arms are crossed, his head floppy as if he’s sleeping, or on the point of sleeping.

‘Amazing.’ AJ stands in the doorway, arms folded. ‘You’re where you’re meant to be. The last place I’d have looked.’

The Big Lurch lifts his head a little. Frowns.

‘AJ? You look all crazy – like one of those people they lock up in a loony bin. You ought to see a doctor about that – it’s not a good look.’

AJ rubs his eyes. He comes into the room and sits on one of the chairs, running his hands over the soft suede of the armrest. He’s always liked this place – it’s got a comfort to it yet it’s not claustrophobic. You can feel warm in here, and look out on to the world: see the moon or the sun, the city and the trees, the cars and the clouds. It’s like being on the bridge of a ship. The Starship
Enterprise
maybe. The glass shield between here and the outside world is bulletproof. A lot of money has gone into this operations room. A lot of money and power and wealth. The Trust can find finance for this sort of thing, but they can’t stop people like Moses ripping out their own eyes in the breakfast queue.

‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘Do you think our director knows how unhappy we are? Hmm? Does she think we’re happy, or does she know we’re unhappy? What do you sense?’

The Big Lurch lowers his chin and scrutinizes AJ with hauteur. ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

‘She’s too unhappy herself to care what’s going on with us. A person can only see suffering when they’re not suffering themselves. Caring? It’s a luxury, if you want the honest truth.’

AJ nods slowly, appreciatively. The Big Lurch doesn’t speak much – but when he does, his words are premium-rate gilded.

‘So? What’s making her unhappy?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Am I supposed to?’

The Big Lurch turns and faces AJ full on. Surprised. ‘You really don’t know?’

AJ stares at him, mystified. ‘What? What am I supposed to know?’

‘About Jonathan?’

‘
Jonathan?
Jonathan who?’ He fumbles around in his head for a face to connect to the name. A patient? No – no Jonathans in the unit. The only person he can think of is Jonathan Keay – an occupational therapist who left the unit last month. ‘Jonathan Keay, you mean?’

‘Of course Jonathan Keay.’

‘The ocky therapy guy who left? What about him?’

The Big Lurch gives AJ an amused half-smile. He lets a puff of laughter come out of his chest.
Aha aha aha
. ‘AJ,
seriously
, my man! For a switched-on person, you occasionally lack perspicacity.’

‘Then tell me, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Melanie and Keay? You didn’t notice?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Oh please, mate. Please.’

AJ lowers his eyes to the smooth arms of the chair – moves his hands up and down, up and down. Melanie and Jonathan Keay? Seriously? Until now he’s always imagined he was the one who knew the secrets. That
he
walked around with the knowledge of the world on his shoulders. Apparently not, though. Apparently he is the last to know. OT staff giving it the old jiggety-jig with top-drawer management? If it’s true, that’s fairly scandalous stuff – the biggest taboo, like incest, or staff sleeping with a patient. Montagues and Capulets. Melanie herself said it – the Trust takes a dim view of it.

And meanwhile her and Keay? Jonathan is someone AJ has never given much thought to. A normal enough guy – late thirties, a lot of experience under his belt. If AJ recalls rightly, Keay and Melanie had worked together in another unit in the north of England before they came here. They’d both started on low grades and had worked their way up the ranks. No one quite knows why he left Beechway last month. Word had it, he’d left on medical grounds. It was all very sudden, he didn’t even say goodbye – one moment he was there, the next he wasn’t. AJ vaguely remembers a card arriving – written in very formal handwriting – from his mother:
Thank you for being such generous colleagues to my son – he will miss you all
. It had a kind of funereal aura to it.

AJ had always assumed, without particularly focusing on it, that Keay had some sort of secret private life he didn’t want to talk about. At the time, AJ hadn’t much cared, but now he’s combing through every word the guy ever said – putting it in the context that Keay’s secret may have been an affair with Melanie. Maybe her frantic little episode with the voddy had something to do with him. Everything AJ thought he knew about Melanie jack-knifes and amplifies and turns itself somersault over somersault and his estimation – and jealousy – of Jonathan Keay takes a quantum leap.

His attention is dragged away from his speculation by one of the CCTV monitors. He wonders what it was that brought him down here – it certainly wasn’t to speculate about the love lives of the other staff. It was something that was bugging him about the camera system in the unit. But what?

The monitors show nothing. Empty, motionless corridors. The outdoor-training Astro court. The pinch point in the stem corridor. Even a view of the security pod from behind and above – him and the Big Lurch sitting there, the backs of their heads barely clipping into the bottom edge of the frame.

And then it hits him. He sits forward a little, peering at the images. He thinks he knows what it is. The thing that’s been bothering him, the reason the word ‘delusion’ has always seemed so inaccurate. He stays where he is, staring at the screens, his thoughts turning slow cartwheels. The smell in the nurses’ station earlier – the burning-fish smell of a fused kettle. The smell in Moses’ room that morning. Something in the building had fused that day too.

‘Hey,’ he says slowly. ‘These cameras – you log the footage you take, don’t you?’

The Big Lurch throws him a sarcastic look. ‘No – they’re there for show. I use them to play my porn on the long dark nights. Of course we log it, bro. I mean, it only stays on for two weeks, but we log it.’

‘The night Zelda self-harmed – when she did her arms – you lost that because of the power cut.’

‘Uh huh.’ He nods. ‘I told you there’s something weird going on in this place – the power cutting out all the time, and it’s always some different reason.’

‘And the night Zelda died?’

‘Yeah – same thing that night. And the—’ He stops. He takes his feet off the desk with a bang. Twists the chair to face AJ. ‘You know what – you’re right. Every single time there’s been a power cut.’

The Secret of Flying

FARTLEK
MEANS ‘SPEED
play’ in Swedish. It is a training method designed to place stresses on the aerobic and anaerobic systems, stimulating the heart and discouraging it from falling into a steady rhythm. It can be adjusted to suit the individual, and is therefore ideal for anyone wanting to recoup their fitness after a long period of inactivity.

The football ground behind Avon and Somerset police’s northern operations centre has its own mini-‘Fartlek hill’, a man-made mound at one end of the pitch with three polyurethane tartan track lanes snaking up and over it. At seven a.m., just as the sun is rising above the city, thirty-year-old Sergeant Flea Marley pushes herself up the hill. She passes the bases of the three wind turbines mounted along the crest, runs down the other side. Keeping her pace hard and fast, she executes a speed turn at the foot of the hill and races back up it. Her black, wicking force T-shirt – ‘POLICE’ embossed on the deltoids – is saturated with sweat. It evaporates off her in clouds. With Fartlek you have to push through the lactic-acid build – the bleed of pain in the long muscles. The nausea. You have to want to do it.

Flea wants to do it. She wants to get back to fitness. She is sergeant of the force’s Underwater Search Unit – the police diving team. A woman in a man’s world and above everything she needs her body to be in tune. Over ten months ago she was hurt in an explosion in a tunnel which left her with muscle injuries to her thigh and a burst eardrum. It’s been a long haul getting fit again. But she’s made the most of it – she’s worked it and worked it. She is, quite simply, a different person from the one she was last year. In control – and things in her head are nicely spaced. It’s all been about putting things in boxes in her head. Closing lids. That’s the secret of flying – you never look down or over your shoulder.

She abandons the hill and enters the pitch, moving into the easy running phase. She pounds along – the ground dry and cold underfoot. The turf pitch is unlit – the only luminance comes from the floodlights over on the Astro where a youth-alliance football team are doing morning training. The compression sleeve she had on her thigh for months is off now, and the air on it feels good. The burst eardrum got infected and held her back longer than she expected – she’s been at work but on restricted duties for eight months – she probably won’t be able to dive for another three weeks, after a visit to the barotrauma specialists in Plymouth to be formally ticked back into work. But her body feels organized, and for the first time in ages she thinks she looks nice too. She’s gained weight and her skin is healthy.

As she transitions into the final minute of fast pace she realizes she’s being watched. A man is sitting on a bench in the arbour that leads to the car park – under a sweep of autumnal branches.

She circuits the full five hundred metres, monitoring him with small glances as she does. The leaves are on the ground around him, and he wears a dark-blue gabardine jacket, the collar up, his elbows on his knees. His face is hard, set – he has a wide neck, intense blue eyes and thick dark hair kept very short. If he got up it would be a calm movement – one that people, especially women, would notice. Flea knows this because she knows who it is. It’s DI Jack Caffery.

She hasn’t seen or spoken to him in almost a year – and she doesn’t acknowledge him now. Instead she executes a sixty-metre sprint along the eastern edges of the pitch, dropping the pace as she comes round the corner. He’ll be able to watch her uninterrupted, and that’s fine. For the first time in ages she likes her body – she doesn’t mind people watching it. She’s got a lot to be proud of.

As she rounds the top end of the pitch, her airwaves radio in the black holster around her bicep gives a familiar warble. It’s the unique sound of a point-to-point contact – someone wanting to speak to her directly. She slows her running to a long loping gait, pulling the radio out of her holster. Maybe this is his way of contacting her. But when she sees the ID on the handset it’s not Jack Caffery but Wellard, her acting sergeant.