Mo Hayder - Poppet

There is a moment where he sees her face lit by the dashboard, her honey-blonde hair hanging bedraggled around her face, and he sees she is crying again. Then she is through the security gates and gone, leaving him staring into nothing.

CAFFERY LEANS BACK against the inside of the tree, in a half-sitting position, his back supported, his head contorted like Alice after the EAT ME cake. He shines the torch on the sleeping bag, thinking about what it would be like, sleeping out here. Sheltered from the wind, at least. Isaac Handel knew this area as a child – he must have, it’s so close to Upton Farm. But Caffery’s not sure what it means, that he’s gravitated back here. Is it only because it’s familiar? Or is there another reason? Some unfinished business?

The pliers and the wire and the other things Handel bought at Wickes aren’t here. Maybe they’re elsewhere in the woods. Caffery starts to manoeuvre himself backwards out of the cave, ticking off in his head the searches and permissions he’s going to need. Surveillance. The superintendent should OK the surveillance spend, but he can’t picture anyone in the Force Targeting Team relishing the prospect of staking out this place. They have a limited overtime allowance and they’re not going to waste it. They want a nice warm car to sit in. Not bird watchers’ gear, sou’westers and peeing in a bottle.

Something dangles near Caffery’s face. He freezes, half bent over. His eyes rotate slowly, and he lifts the torch, partly as a weapon. The object is inches away from his eyes – so close it takes a moment to focus. It’s the crudely stitched face of a doll. It must have been wedged between the roots overhead and Caffery has dislodged it. It hangs from its legs, upside down, swinging with the momentum of its drop.

It bears all the hallmarks of one of Isaac’s poppets. The mix of textures – in this case a butterscotch-coloured fake leather for the skin, highly polished porcelain for the face, and a strange little dress made from a scrap of white lace. Caffery doesn’t touch it. He scrambles his glasses out from the pocket of his North Face, crams them on his face and cants his head round so he can study it in the torchlight.

Yes, it’s similar to the others. But there’s more. This one is different, nastier. It’s a female with long yellow strands of wool, like blonde hair, that sway as she rocks to and fro upside down. Her hair is free, but nothing else is. She is gagged with a narrow strip of duct tape and her arms are folded across her chest, stitched there. As if to secure her arms further the wrists have been bound with a delicate silver chain wrapped tightly around them.

Caffery is now sufficiently conversant with Handel’s style to understand. This means a woman, a flesh-and-blood woman in the real world that Handel has plans for. She has blonde hair and in her wardrobe will be a lace dress or a blouse with a tiny, unnoticed tear in it. Missing from her jewellery box will be a silver bracelet.

THE PLANS OF Beechway High Secure Unit are like the map of the Odyssean labyrinth. So multilayered, multifaceted you could lose yourself. A print of them has been framed and mounted in Melanie’s office and now AJ stands and stares blankly at them. Maybe there is something in this place that can engulf a person. It swallowed Pauline and Moses and Zelda. Maybe it’s busily swallowing him too.

He runs his hands through his hair. Scrunches up his eyes and wishes he could take a pill – some of the drugs the patients get when they go into crisis. Something just to switch his head off and sluice things out of him. He glances over his shoulder at the kitchenette. The little touches of homeliness Melanie has added. A print of a cat sleeping on a white Mediterranean wall. A teapot in two pieces, painted with the blue water and sky of the Riviera. He’s sure he and Mel have touched something in each other. But this? This secret? All the openness he thought they had – after sex and laughing and their candid admission sessions – after all that, she’s still hidden things. AJ is sure it’s got something to do with her separation from Jonathan, he just doesn’t know what. This is turning to a bleaker day than the one when his mother died – alone in the garden, with grass and earth coating her half-bitten tongue.

He washes up the coffee cups. Melanie’s left an open packet of chocolate digestives, which he diligently wraps and tucks into a tin. He switches off the light and heads back through her office. At the door he stops. He stands very still, his head against it, his hand on the light switch. He breathes in and out.

Then he switches the light back on, goes to the window, lowers the blinds and sits down at Melanie’s desk. It’s made of functional beech – very light and honey-clear, everything organized carefully. There is an old-fashioned in-and-out-tray stacker with one or two envelopes in it. Her computer is a PC with a light-up wireless mouse on a mat that has a quote printed on it, white against a blue background: Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving .

AJ looks at the mat for a long time. Eventually he touches the mouse. Just his finger resting lightly on it. The computer comes to life.

It is password-locked.

Of course it is.

He sits back, almost relieved. He doesn’t want to be the sneak. He really doesn’t. He has no right to spy on Melanie or judge her. It’s not as if he’s perfect. She’s had it hard, and maybe he should understand more. She didn’t know where all this would lead. He’s going to call her. Say he’s sorry. He pulls out his phone and looks at the screen and instantly all he can picture is Isaac Handel with his hands around Zelda’s neck. He puts it back in his pocket.

He taps his fingers on his knees, undecided. Then he opens the bottom drawer of her desk. There is nothing much of interest in there – a sponge bag, a pair of purple kitten-heel shoes – maybe in case she needs to look smart for an unexpected occasion. Also some deodorant and a pair of flesh-coloured tights. In the next drawer there is a desk organizer full of paper clips and rubber bands. Wedged under it is a hefty paperback book.

He pulls the book out: Screaming Walls – A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to the UK’s Most Haunted Asylums . It must be something she’s bought in the wake of The Maude’s appearances. Maybe she wants to study precedents of the unit’s ‘haunting’. The date of publication as 1999 – long before the first manifestations of The Maude in Beechway. Out of curiosity he flicks to the index and looks for Beechway. It’s not mentioned. He’s about to put the book back when something else occurs to him.

The index takes up four pages, but he runs his finger down each page, just out of curiosity, his eye scanning the alphabet: Bedlam (Bethlem) ; Care in the Community ; Cherry Knowle Hospital, Sunderland ; Denbigh Hospital ; DSMV diagnosis ; ectenic force ; Hine, G.T. (architect) ; Mental Health Act, effects of ; Ryhope General ; St George Field, Bethlem ; ‘Sitting’ and possession …

He comes to a halt, his finger under the words. Sitting and possession?

Quickly he turns to the page number.

The text is dotted with plans and photos of a mock-Gothic building, a classic workhouse structured on the enpeigne or ‘comb’ principle, with separate units connected like the teeth of a comb to a spine. The Gothic Revival details have been shored up by some hasty council; a set of columns that would originally have been constructed of iron core covered in plaster to resemble stone have been replaced by stacked and painted breezeblocks. But the pointed arched windows and external crenels remain intact.