Mo Hayder - Poppet

In his office he makes them each a cup of coffee – AJ looks as if he needs it almost as much as Caffery does, maybe more – and they sit, AJ on the sofa, Caffery at the desk.

‘So, AJ, what can I do for you?’

AJ puts his hand to his mouth and gives an embarrassed cough.

‘Well, uh – before we go any further – this has to be in confidence.’

Caffery raises an eyebrow. ‘In theory that’s OK. But no promises until I know what we’re talking about.’

‘It’s extremely important no one knows I’m here.’

‘Someone’s threatening you?’

‘No, it’s not that – it’s …’ He hesitates, then says in a rush, ‘Something’s going on where I work. Or rather, it was going on. We’re a high-secure unit, if you remember, and things have been happening that don’t feel right … I’m uneasy.’

Caffery takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes tiredly. ‘Just for future reference, Mr LeGrande, “I’m uneasy” is not a phrase cops are fond of. Don’t expect to be welcomed if you go bandying it about. Has an unwelcome ring. But go ahead anyway.’

‘OK. This is going to sound a bit nuts – but there you go, I work in a nuthouse, so what can I say.’

‘Are you allowed to call it a nuthouse?’

‘I am, you’re not. You’re on the outside. On the inside we have special privileges. Believe me, we deserve them.’ He gives a brief smile. ‘It’s a loony bin. And in our particular loony bin, ever since I can remember, there’s been an even loonier myth doing the rounds. It’s a …’ He sighs, half embarrassed. ‘A ghost story that kind of circulates amongst the patients from time to time. They’re suggestible – you can imagine. We try to keep a lid on it where we can. But it’s popped up a few times, and at least three times I know of, what’s ended up happening has been a bizarre cluster of DSH cases.’

‘DSH?’

‘Sorry – deliberate self-harm. People cutting themselves, that sort of thing. A few years back it escalated to a death – maybe a suicide, we don’t know for sure. Then a week ago there was another death – a heart attack, according to the doctors. But it doesn’t feel right.’

Caffery taps his pen thoughtfully, studying AJ’s face. It’s a sad story, one he’s heard before. Suicides in a secure unit always make the senior staff unhappy – deeply unhappy – but they rarely turn out to be anything MCIT needs to be interested in. Maybe this can be moved through the system quickly.

‘One guy put his own eye out.’

‘Nasty.’

‘Nasty, though not that uncommon in a, you know, loony bin. But he had the same hallucinations – just like the patient we lost last week. Her heart attack was after delusions. And it was the same a few years ago, when the other patient died. She’d convinced herself she’d seen The Mau— Sorry, I didn’t explain: they call this thing “The Maude”.’

‘The Maude?’

AJ shakes his head. ‘It’s a long story. But whatever was going on in this one patient’s mind was so bad that one day she walks out of the unit and no one sees her again. Not until months later when they find her body in the grounds. The autopsy never did say for sure how she died – I think everyone had it in the back of their head it was a suicide, but it got moved on down the tracks.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Pauline Scott.’

It rings vague bells for Caffery.

It was before his time, but he’s fairly sure it’s a case Flea mentioned, notable because it was embarrassing for everyone concerned: Beechway, for letting a vulnerable patient wander out, and the police search advisor, the POLSA, on Flea’s unit, who was tasked with the search and didn’t quite extend the parameters far enough. So easy to miss someone a few metres outside. He doesn’t move his eyes, but his attention trails across the room to Misty’s face. A search like that? Metres, even centimetres, can count.

‘Except,’ AJ says, ‘I think it’s a case of the Scooby-Doo ghost.’

‘A case of the what?’

‘Scooby-Doo. You know – Scooby and Shaggy and the gang always catch the ghost, pull off its mask and turns out to be … I dunno, the local property developer or something? Wants to make people believe the place is haunted so the land prices drop? That’s what I call a Scooby ghost – something that’s real but it’s made to look supernatural. I reckon we’ve got one haunting the corridors of Beechway.’

‘And you’re Shaggy—’

‘No, I’m Velma. I’m the brains. And I’m Scully, by the way, because sometimes I get asked that too.’

‘Velma. Scully. The stage is all yours. Hit me.’

AJ nods. If he had nerd glasses he’d push them up his nose.

‘OK. I can’t find out for certain, but I’m pretty sure every time it’s happened there’s been a power cut.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Power cuts put the CCTV system down.’

‘Have a lot of power cuts, do you?’

‘No. Two, maybe three – that’s all I can remember in the four years I’ve been there.’ He puts his rucksack on the floor and unzips it. ‘I’ve got something I want you to see. It won’t mean anything to you, but to me …?’ He gives a small, pained smile. ‘Well, it frightened the daylights out of me.’

FLEA STANDS IN her low-ceilinged kitchen and makes breakfast. Standing so close to the stove at last a bit of warmth begins to crawl back into her bones. She’s showered and scrubbed, but it’s taking for ever to get the cold of the quarry out of her.

She stares blankly at the eggs and bacon sizzling in the skillet, turns them automatically. The bacon is the Old Spot stuff from the local farmers’ market and the eggs are from a neighbouring family who, in spite of her insistence, are trying to say thank you for two hours she spent fixing a manifold pump on their under-floor heating. As a diver she knows about pumps, it wasn’t a difficult job, but they keep leaving eggs at her back door. Eggs, eggs everywhere. Eggs coming out of the walls.

She slides breakfast on to a plate and plonks it down without ceremony on the table. A heavy mug of strong coffee and a jar of sugar with a spoon stuck in it. She’s a proper support-group sergeant – likes her breakfasts fried and unfussy. The ketchup is in a squeezy bottle. No airs and graces here. Mum and Dad would have both fallen down in a flat faint if they’d ever caught the faintest whiff of pretension.

‘So,’ she murmurs as she pulls up a chair and begins to eat. ‘Just as well you’re not here then, isn’t it.’

She chews with concentration – elbows on the table. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t look to either side. It’s better sometimes not to remember where you are. Especially when it’s the house of your dead parents. Dad would know what to say to her now – he’d put his hand on her shoulder and answer her questions. She’d say: Dad, is it OK to just let things be? And if it is then what do I tell this guy – how do I explain it to him, because one thing’s for sure – he’s not going to leave it be .

Dad would kiss her head, talk to her gently, reasonably. He’d know the answers. And if he didn’t know what to say, he’d talk to Mum. They’d go into the room at the end of the house, switch on the light over the piano and sit in facing armchairs. They’d speak in low voices – talking until they had a solution to her problem. They’d close ranks and Flea would be safe.

She has to stop chewing then. She pauses, and, with an effort, swallows the mouthful. She picks up the mug and gulps a few swigs of coffee to wash it down. Then she sits for a while, her head lowered, staring at the eggs and bacon.

There must, somewhere, be an equation for how long grief lasts. A calculator like they have for currencies online: you’d jab in things like your age, your gender, your job, your social life. You’d divide it by how close you were to the person who’s gone, you’d have to add lots of points for the fact you haven’t got a body to bury, and you’d get a number – a finite quantity – a guarantee that after exactly 573 days the pain would stop. Christ, if you can convert the Pakistani rupee into zlotys, if you can map the human genome and work out what Martian soil is composed of, why can’t you calculate when the hurt will be over?