Poppet

by Mo Hayder

  He sits with Stewart at his foot and eats, using the biscuits to mop up the gravy. Biscuits. He’s always been a bit split-headed about biscuits: are they cookies or are they, like these, a kind of savoury scone? He doesn’t ask Patience because she’s fretting over the form on the Cheltenham Showcase. She and Mum had the betting habit – they both claimed it was passed down in the genes from their mother. AJ recalls the many long afternoons he spent as a small child, waiting outside the bookies’ in Thornbury while his mum and Patience went inside, armed with their purses and newspapers. He was too young to join them inside, so the two women would come out to compare the form with him, asking him what he thought. ‘You’re our lucky mascot,’ they’d laugh. Lucky, lucky.

  ‘So much for my inheritance,’ AJ says as he moves the sausages around the plate. ‘You put it all on Rude Boy to win at Wincanton.’

  Patience dumps the skillet down with a bang. He likes winding her up because she is fabulously tetchy on this subject. ‘Yes, and what’s your point?’

  ‘I dunno – I suppose you could have put it each way? At least you’d have covered your ass.’

  ‘There’s not enough money in the world to cover my butt,’ Patience says, straight-faced.

  ‘Stop being such a stereotype, Patience. You’re behaving like something out of Gone with the Wind. Talking like it too. You’re half white.’

  ‘So? Why should I stop? Give people what they expect, it makes life a whole lot simpler.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re only perpetuating negative images of your race.’

  ‘My half race. And that – what you just said – it’s all psychobabble. You got that from that place you work.’

  ‘It’s not psychobabble, it’s a vernacular far more rooted in the sociological sciences than in psychology,’ he says loftily. ‘And I didn’t get it from the unit. You can pick up a comment like that on any street corner.’

  Aunt Patience can’t answer him when he starts talking that way, so she gives a big stage yawn, and turns away to check her texts. That’s how her tips come in these days. Not from the biroed circles on the back pages of a newspaper, the way he remembers as a child, but from bookies who have her phone number on their lists and text her.

  As much love and company as Patience provides, there is a price. She’s as bad with money as Mum was. AJ’s convinced that, if he wasn’t around to keep an eye on her, this home and everything in it would have long since been gambled away. Not that it’s much, a funny old place made up of three tiny cottages tacked together. There are three staircases – and that suited him and Mum and Patience. The communal space was downstairs, while each individual had their own bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. Mum’s bedroom was the centre one. He and Patience could use it as a storeroom or something now that Mum was dead, but neither of them want to raise the subject so the room sits empty. A hole above them. They don’t mention it because then they’d have to talk about Mum’s death.

  Yes, he thinks, feeding the rest of his link sausage to Stewart, when it comes to the way Mum died there are some things that will probably never get said.

  He is inked in to work tomorrow morning so he’s got to readjust his sleep patterns (for the millionth time). He goes to bed at two p.m., hoping the lovage brandy will help him sleep until maybe four the next morning, but the whole thing with Melanie keeps nagging at him and, although he drifts off by two fifteen, and although it’s a deep, dreamless sleep for a change, four hours later he’s wide awake.

  He lies there for a while, looking out of the window at the countryside. He misses Mum. He misses her so much. But he takes a very special comfort from the countryside, and his place within it. His neighbours are the local wildlife; when he’s shooing the deer away from Patience’s pink roses, he can recognize each individual from its markings, height, scars. He likes the solitude. He likes the fact that his clothes can smell of a bonfire without people wrinkling their noses. It’s so remote out here that on days when he’s really tired he doesn’t have to bother getting dressed – he’ll walk around the garden in long johns and boots like a character in a cowboy movie.

  He’s not lonely. But he’s not sure that’s good enough any more – the simple state of not being lonely. Maybe this means mourning Mum has moved into a different phase – maybe he’s ready to start being with people again. Maybe it even means he’s ready to be a proper grown-up, have a proper adult relationship? At the spring-chicken age of forty-three? It’s a big, big step. Not something he is going to do lightly.

  He glances at his watch. Six twenty. He yawns and gets up and goes into his bathroom and showers. As he’s shaving he notices a measuring spoon on top of the medicine cabinet doing a silent balancing act, as if it’s hovering on the edge. He puts down the razor and goes to it. The plastic double-ended spoon is only sitting there upright because it has become lodged in the sticky, unwiped residue of some ancient cough linctus. As a coordinator, he’s responsible for compiling weekly reports on the hygiene of the wards. Now that’s a laugh.

  He gets a bin bag and sweeps everything into it, using a rag to mop up the crystallized green syrup. He drops empty cartons of paracetamol dated 2009 and a carton of Q-tips he remembers having when he got his first job aged twenty. What sort of woman would put up with this, he thinks impatiently. Really. What sort of lunatic would buy into this dump? Certainly not a mature, sensible woman.

  Melanie Arrow probably lives in one of those Scandinavian houses – walls of perfect white, furniture of driftwood and linen. He imagines row after row of exquisitely tailored blouses hanging in dry-cleaning bags. And – if he’s honest – he imagines silk knickers too.

  ‘Hey,’ he tells his reflection. ‘You can stop it there. Wrong. All wrong.’

  His reflection blinks back at him. He holds its gaze for a long time. Then he puts a hand up at the mirror. To hell with it. He’s going to do something about it.

  The Truth About Misty Kitson

  EIGHT HOURS SEARCHING for Misty Kitson’s body and Flea Marley’s diving unit, which is here because it has a remit to assist with any search, land-or water-based, has worked hard, using scientifically formulated patterns. They have been given a hundred-metre band which encircles the area covered a year ago when Misty first went missing. This search is an extension of the original two-mile radius around the rehab clinic – an austere, white Palladian building that sits high on a hill. It is going to take a week to complete and as far as any of the searchers can tell it’s based not on new intelligence but on MCIT’s urgent need to prove to the media they are still doing something. By mid-afternoon the team has found nothing and the light is dying. They drive back to the offices in their white Mercedes Sprinter van, their spirits low. Some of the men jump straight into their cars and head home, others take time to warm up – brewing tea and showering – letting the hot water dig out the cold in their bones.

  Flea is the last one left in the building. She stands in the shower with her eyes closed, the water thrumming on the back of her neck, thinking about the day. A full-on, rapid-edit montage of all the places they’ve searched unreels in her head. Smash cut: the clinic perimeter; match cut: electricity substation; jump cut: a B road. Jack Caffery standing silently, watching her, the same way he watched her running this morning. Not speaking.

  She hasn’t let his scrutiny bother her – she’s searched the locations painstakingly, acting her heart out. Only she knows it’s a waste of time. Misty’s bones aren’t lodged in a hedgerow. Or scattered in a field, or buried in a shallow grave in one of the copses near the clinic. They are several miles away from the clinic – on the other side of the county.

  Flea Marley knows this because she is the one who concealed the body. Almost eighteen months ago. It’s one of the things she’s been working to keep locked in a box inside her head. One of the things she can’t look at unless she wants to lose the secret of flying. Crash and burn.

  She switches off the shower, steps out and towels off. The offices are empty now – it
’s just her and row after row of diving suits hanging like ghosts in the kit room. The masks in the locker room. The dead-body bags in the technician’s room. No one to check on her or ask her what she’s doing. She wipes steam off the mirror with the towel and stares at her reflection. Yes, she’s fuller in the face – her skin is healthier – but now MCIT is reinvestigating Misty’s disappearance, there’s a thin, scared tightness around her eyes again.

  She has been faintly desperate all day – thinking at any moment she was going to cry. It’s weird no one has noticed it. Even now she has to count to ten, until she’s sure she’s not going to start blubbing like a baby. Then she sprays on deodorant, pulls her sports clothing out of her rucksack and dresses slowly. Lots of layers – it’s cold out there. She pulls waterproof trousers on over her leggings, and a big force-issue Montane jacket. She stuffs nitrile and Thinsulate gloves into her pocket, turns off all the lights, checks all the computers are switched off, and heads out to the car park, her face down.

  Rush hour has died, but it still takes more than an hour to wind her way across the north of Somerset. She passes close to her house, close to the clinic – the key places on the vast storyboard of what really happened to Misty Kitson all those months ago. When she stops, it’s on a small C road a mile south-east of the clinic, at the bottom of two huge fields that sweep down from the woods around Farleigh Park Hall.

  All day while the team have been searching she’s surreptitiously monitored this location on the map – sliding her secret attention over to it on the dashboard – calculating how long before the planned search would come round to this road. It’s just outside the area searched last year, and it’s slated to be covered in this new sweep. Probably it’ll be late the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.

  She opens the car door and drops her feet on to the tarmac. It’s so quiet this far out in the countryside – real live things live out here – like deer and badger and rabbit. Somewhere an owl is hooting – up in the trees at the top of the slope. Even concentrating, she can’t hear a single engine – not a car or an aeroplane. Nothing. She hauls out her rucksack and shoulders it. Kicks the door closed.

  This road is a small, rarely frequented route – a few farmers’ fields on the left, forest on the right. She knows it well. As she walks, high up beyond the trees ahead, the faint glow of lights from a hamlet appear. There was a murder in that hamlet not so long ago. All the American and Chinese and Japanese tourists who come round here and make goggle eyes at the pretty cottages and thatches and village greens … they don’t know the half of it. The unzippered ugliness of it all. The killings, the rapes, the wife beatings, the jealousy, the hit and runs.

  Yes, the hit and runs. People never spare a thought for all those hit and runs.

  The road takes an abrupt bend to the left, then continues in a straight, roman line for the next half a mile – flat and opaque, until it dwindles into the night a hundred metres ahead. Above the clouds the moon is full and it sends down a scattered, diffuse glow that’s sufficient to navigate by. She walks, pacing out the steps, counting in her head. Fifty metres down she stops and turns to face the fields, surveying them with her razor-sharp knowledge. She turns to the hamlet and does the same. The bearings are slightly wrong, so she continues a few more paces and repeats the exercise. This time she gets it straight away. Yup. This is where it happened.

  She lowers her rucksack to the ground and clicks the head torch on. It has to be angled down so it’s illuminating the tarmac. The area needs to be searched in the finest detail. Things need to be removed before the team comes through here. One slip and she will be in the deepest shit. If she has to put half the hedgerow into her rucksack, she’s going to. There mustn’t be anything – anything at all – to connect this location with what really happened to Misty Kitson.

  She pulls on the nitrile gloves and sets to work. It’s no different from any other fingertip search she’s done – a regular grid pattern to make sure every inch of the road is covered. She collects everything she finds – regardless of what – and puts it in the rucksack. A crisp packet, two beer tins, some toilet paper. A ring-pull that looks about fifty years old and an old CD. Maybe none of it is relevant, maybe all of it.

  When she’s a hundred per cent sure there is nothing left here except the dead leaves and the naked blackberry bushes, she pulls the torch off her head and uses it to inspect the road itself – the tarmac. The skidmarks are still here but they are so, so faint. She has to sink to her haunches and rest her hand on them to believe they still exist. A year and a half ago they were like a deep scar on the road – but nearly eighteen months of rain and sun and English seasons have leached the rubber away.

  The sound of a car engine grows in the distance. A few seconds later headlights – from the direction she’s parked. She gets up and steps smartly into the verge, clicking off the head torch as she does. As the car appears round the corner she presses herself tightly against a tree. Puts her hands in her pockets and drops her face, presenting as few reflective surfaces as possible.

  The car passes. And almost instantly slows. And then, just fifty metres away, it stops. Her heart sinks. The engine is killed, and in the sudden silence comes the clear click of a door closing. Footsteps.

  A crunch of gravel. Whoever it is they’re close, really close. Slowly, furtively, she rolls back into the shadows, her shoulders tight. She slides down the tree until she’s sitting and pulls the hood of her coat over her face. Like an ostrich. Head in the sand. She stays absolutely still, monitoring the footsteps. Just her and the thick drumbeat of her heart in her ears, greenish commas of light pulsing behind her eyes from the headlights. No reason for someone to stop out here in the middle of nowhere. No reason whatsoever. This is no-man’s-land.

  The noise stops and she dares to glance sideways. There – about a yard away, are two feet in walking boots. The lizard part of her brain scurries over them – knows they’re familiar – can’t quite connect to why they are and what it all means.

  She raises her eyes. DI Jack Caffery is standing there. Dressed in black all-weather gear. His hands in his pockets, looking down at her.

  High Street

  AJ ONLY HAS to wait for ten minutes, feeling like a stalker or a nervous teenager outside the girls’ school gates, before Melanie appears at the off-licence, same as last night. He loiters outside, watching her speak to the sales assistant. Nodding. Concentrating on putting her pin number in the terminal.

  Moments later she emerges, the long sleeves of her blouse peeking out of her raincoat, bouncing with each step. She is so close, almost two metres away, when she sees him.

  ‘Oh no,’ she groans, bringing herself up short. ‘You caught me again.’

  ‘It’s not what it looks like – I wasn’t following you. I always do my shopping here.’

  She smiles tiredly. ‘Well, this isn’t what it looks like either.’ She opens her carrier bag and shows him two cartons of orange juice. ‘To go with the vodka at home.’

  AJ peers up at the darkening sky, then over at his car, then up and down the street. He wishes he knew which angle it is that makes him look like Presley because he’d adopt it right this second. Instead he says:

  ‘Vodka has its limitations, in my humble opinion. I wonder if you’ve ever ventured into the wild-and-woolly world of cider drinking.’

  ‘Wild and woolly?’

  ‘Yes – we’re, uh, tree huggers. Most of us have beards and wear Fair Isles – I’m the exception to the rule.’ He nods up the street to the old pub, beloved of the local cider connoisseurs. ‘But if you did ever want to risk the hairy element – that would be the place to start.’

  She turns and glances over her shoulder at the pub. She stares at it for a long time. His heart sinks – she’s formulating a way to say no. But when she turns back she’s smiling. She puts a hand over her eyes to shield it from the overhead street light so she can meet his gaze.

  ‘I dunno,’ she says. ‘You sure I’m not a littl
e overdressed?’

  The Ostrich

  ‘HI,’ CAFFERY SAYS, as if he’s just wandered in on Flea in her office. ‘Think you’ve got time for a chat?’

  She can’t do anything now except respond. Get her big ugly ostrich head out of the sand.

  ‘Yeah.’ She stands casually, straightening her jacket and brushing some of the mud from her hands, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be sitting behind a tree in the middle of nowhere on a freezing-cold night. She gives him a tight, teenage grin and a wave. ‘Hi. How’re things?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Freezing.’ She comes out and stands in front of him. Wraps her arms around her – shivers. ‘One of the boys left a GPS unit out here today. They’re too lazy to come back and get it, so who’s the obvious monkey who has to do it?’ She makes bunny ears on her head. ‘The sergeant – because that’s what we’re here for. A few extra hundred quid a month in return for taking all the shit, all the responsibility. I’d go back to being a grunt like’ – she snaps her fingers – ‘that.’

  He nods, silently. His eyes are very dark and very steady. He’s not having any of it.

  She holds up her hands, to say OK, whatever. ‘But how the hell did you find me?’ She gestures around at the empty road stretching into the darkness. ‘Out in the middle of—?’

  ‘A guess.’

  ‘A guess? You guessed I’d be here? Seriously?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Explain.’

  He laughs ironically – as if to say, The explanation is so long, so embroidered and ornate and convoluted it would take a thousand years. Then his face sobers. ‘I ordered the extra search. You know that.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She gives a grim smile. Shoves her hands into her pockets. ‘Look, I hope this won’t come as a surprise to you, Jack, but everyone’s thinking WTF about this search – why you ordered it. The only answer we can come up with is you’re doing it to keep the press happy.’