Mo Hayder - Poppet

The window has been open overnight – cracked on to the secure setting so some air can circulate – and the room is freezing. Early sunlight comes through the window. The poppets lie on the tiled surface, motionless, eyes staring at the ceiling. What is it about them that makes him sure they’ve only lain down like this in the last few seconds? That all night while he’s been asleep they’ve been moving? Maybe creeping out of the window frame. Finding the nearest churchyard and lifting gravestones.

He pulls on his gloves and picks up the male doll. Graham Handel. Using the knife’s tweezer head, he carefully unpicks the stitching. Underneath the outer layer is an inner layer of stained muslin. This is covered in writing, though Caffery can’t immediately decipher it – or even decide which language it’s written in, the ink is so smudged. He finishes stripping the outside covering, lays it out to one side, like a miniature flayed skin, and sets to work unpicking the muslin. Inside is another layer.

When both dolls are unpicked he has lined up in his utility room eight tiny skins all in different shades and fabrics. One set of four has all the characteristics of a female, with breasts and hips. The other has a penis. Scattered among the fabric wrappings are the other things he’s discovered stuffed inside the dolls. The dolls’ teeth, he sees, are not fashioned from polished shells as he’d thought, but human. Eight of them – yellow and old. Incisors and molars. Two tangled masses of hair – one blond, one dark – and something that looks, to his experienced eye, like the shrivelled, mummified remains of human ears.

THE RECURRING DREAM is different tonight. It starts, as always, in a room with smooth walls. There’s the length of silk reaching into a hole from the ceiling, but this time it’s a wire. And this time Penny knows the room is in a wood. She can hear the chatter of birds and smell the fresh air. She gets a glimpse of an opening – sees snow. She stands and turns towards it, and there is Suki, a puppy again, leaping in the snow, leaving the ground and landing on all four paws, her ears flopping. She snaps at the flakes, turns and turns, chasing one flake that evades her.

Oh, Suki, Suki .

The dog lifts her head and bounds towards her. There are wet snow and leaves in her hair – but Penny is so overjoyed to see her she scoops her up and sits down, hugging her, burying her face in her fur. She smells like a wet jumper and she is soaked, completely soaked, and so, so cold.

Come on , Penny says, come on – let’s get you dry .

Thank you , Suki says in a deep voice. Thank you – you’ve always been so kind .

Surprised, Penny puts the puppy on the floor. Suki looks up at her. Her face is different – bigger and coarser. Her eyes are narrowed like a human’s.

Suki?

In reply, Suki lifts her paw. It’s a human hand – large and hairy like a man’s. She takes Penny’s hand and squeezes it.

You locked me in , says Suki. You locked me in and now I want to get out .

Penny wakes with a jolt. She is panting. The smell is real and someone is holding her hand. It’s dark in the bedroom, darker than usual. But she can just make out the face on the pillow next to hers.

Not Suki’s but Isaac Handel’s. He is inches away from her, his mouth open in a smile.

CAFFERY UNPICKS THE dolls and finds they contain a grotesque array of body parts and excretions. However, aside from the dolls representing Handel’s parents, the contents are things that have been taken or gleaned from people without violence: hair snippings, nail parings, scraps of clothing, numerous balled tissues stained in some unnameable secretion.

Isaac spent time in that big bedroom taking pieces of his parents and sewing them into the dolls. He didn’t eat the missing parts, or throw them out of a window. He carried them out in plain view.

As for the remaining dolls … this is where Caffery is on less concrete ground. He’s not sure who they are supposed to symbolize, but he’s guessing staff and other patients at Beechway. There is a male doll with, hideously, a red boiled sweet stitched into the socket where an eye would be. Caffery hasn’t forgotten AJ’s conviction that Handel had somehow talked one of the patients into taking his own eye out with a spoon. Moses.

Penny said she imagined there was a doll for her too. He hasn’t found anything that represents her – so maybe Isaac didn’t have any long-term plans for her. Nor has he found anything that relates to AJ or to Melanie Arrow – which is surprising, given that, as head of the unit, she would have represented power and authority in Isaac’s eyes. She’s an attractive woman in a position of power – even someone as sick as Handel would have noticed that.

Caffery isn’t sure whether he should be concerned by this absence or if it’s just a distraction. A case of projecting his own thoughts into someone else. He scribbles a note on the edge of his writing block. Pushes it to one side and continues his study of the other dolls.

Two have been set aside for particular scrutiny. These are the only dolls apart from the parents that have their eyes stitched closed. Maybe they represent other people Isaac has targeted. The two dolls are female. Although they appear to be dead, they are not twisted and tortured and stabbed the way Graham and Louise’s poppets are. Instead these two are cushioned on dirty pink satin, their hands folded over their chests. One is depicted as overweight, dressed in a garish red T-shirt and red socks. The other is dressed simply in crude pyjamas of blue ticking. Her hair is fashioned from strips of silk and it is the colour of soft cheese. Her body is nothing more than a wire frame draped in felt. She looks like a skin-covered skeleton.

On Caffery’s phone is an ante-mortem photograph of Pauline Scott. He looks at the poppet. He looks at the photo. He stares at the poppet again.

And then he picks up the phone.

AJ IS IN his office, trawling the Internet for articles on MHRT tribunals and post-care plans, wondering how the hell Isaac Handel could have disappeared with all the so-called ‘safeguards’ in place. The phone rings. It’s DI Caffery. AJ gets up and closes the door to the office.

‘Yeah – hi,’ he says. ‘I was about to call you. How’s it going?’

‘Sort of OK, sort of not. Tell me – did you look through any of this stuff you brought me?’

‘Not really.’

‘You weren’t curious?’

‘Curiosity killed the cat. Not having a sense of curiosity is the chief reason I’ve survived in this job.’

At the other end of the line Caffery gives a small ironic laugh. ‘Strange, because curiosity is the reason I’ve survived in my job.’

AJ clears his throat. He goes to the window and looks out at the grounds. It’s a squally day; from here he can see the windows of Myrtle Ward. Above it a little electric light comes in slices through the lowered blinds in Melanie’s office. He drops his blind. Turns away from the window.

‘Is there news?’

‘Yes, it’s good news. You’ve convinced me. I’m opening an investigation.’

AJ bites his lip. Thinks about the light glowing in Melanie’s office window behind him. ‘Does that mean you’ve got to come out to the unit?’

‘It does. You know we’re taking this seriously, so maybe you can clear things your end.’

AJ scrunches up his face. What promise did he make himself yesterday? And has he kept it? No.

‘Can you give me a day or so? Is it urgent?’

There’s a tiny pause – a reticence from Caffery. ‘A day or so?’