Mo Hayder: Poppet

He stares at the angel. For a reason he can’t define he knows it’s the grave of a child. He half raises his hand to open the gate, then stops himself. He stands, stock-still, his heart thudding.

Cross that bridge, Jack. Just fucking do it.

USUALLY WHEN AJ leaves the unit he can forget about the place. Not today. Today as he drives home, through the drizzle and morning rush-hour traffic, he keeps going back there in his head. Keeps seeing that smooth face from the nightmare, the constriction in his chest. Keeps re-enacting the later conversation with Melanie.

He wonders, not for the first time, what Zelda Lornton’s postmortem report is going to say. Any death in the unit has, by law, to be investigated by the police and an external review team. The superintendent who took the job admits there’s been a bit of a fire in the coroner’s office over who’s going to do the autopsy. Zelda’s death didn’t strike the coroner as being odd enough to warrant an expensive full-scale post-mortem by a Home Office pathologist, but the ordinary hospital doctors have been reluctant to take on the responsibility of cutting open a patient who has died unexpectedly on a psychiatric unit. The examination has been a hot potato that bounced around the Flax Bourton mortuary like a ping-pong ball until someone put their foot down and insisted one of the pathologists did it as a coroner’s ‘special’ post-mortem – something, apparently, halfway between an ordinary PM and a forensic PM. That was three days ago and they’re still waiting to hear.

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 … some thing .’

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.