Mo Hayder - Poppet

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.’

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.

She bends over, one hand on her thigh, panting. Then, almost recovered, she straightens and holds the radio to her mouth.

‘Hi, Wellard – wassup?’

‘Tried your mobile. No signal.’

‘No – I’m on the football-club track. I think it’s the turbines.’