Mo Hayder: Poppet

‘Jack,’ a voice says as he comes up the drive. He stops. Leaning against the van at the top of the drive is Flea Marley. She has one foot up against the van and is holding coffee in a Thermos cup. She’s in personal protective gear – covered in radios and gizmos – and she looks tired. Her hair is scraped back off her face and she wears no make-up.

He’s reached the end of her jerking him around. He thinks of Jonathan Keay and his confusion and embarrassment that he’d protected Melanie so long. When is he, Caffery, going to wake up to his own blinkered breed of denial? He’s not going to talk to her. Instead he gives her his professional face.

‘Yeah, hi – how’s it looking up there? Easy?’

She pauses. Caught by the hard edge in his voice. ‘Yeah – I … uh.’ She brushes a strand of hair from her face, using her hand to shield her expression. When she drops her hand the look has passed and her manner is all business. ‘Simples,’ she says lightly, gesturing at the hospital. ‘We’ve piled in here tooled up to the ears and it turns out to be nothing. Damp firework. The bronze and silver commanders are in there arguing the small print. Both hostage and the target are compliants, so it makes our job easier.’ She takes a deep, deep breath. ‘Before you go … ?’

‘Yes?’ he says impatiently. ‘What?’

She’s silent for a moment. Then she lowers her face and sips from her Thermos cup. ‘Nothing,’ she mumbles. ‘Nothing. Good luck.’

Caffery knows for sure that ‘nothing’ doesn’t mean ‘nothing’, but he’s a stubborn bastard when he wants to be. He’s not going to forget the way she’s jerked him around this week. He holds a hand up as goodbye, turns and heads up the drive. He doesn’t turn to look at her, though he assumes she’ll be watching him. Hating him.

He goes through security – running the gauntlet of the local uniforms, the security staff puffing themselves up and acting big because the real cops are here. Some of the patients in one of the wards have come to the window to peer out – wondering what has come to pieces in the unit. He can hear them wailing and giggling.

A face appears at the window, grinning at him. A white woman in her thirties who’s been eating something red and sticky which is now smeared across her face, giving her the appearance of a lioness after a kill. She lolls her tongue lasciviously at him. Makes a kissy face. He continues across the central domed area towards the place called Myrtle Ward, following the two uniformed cops who are escorting him.

The place smells like a slaughterhouse toilet. The walls are covered in hand- and footprints, and every wall corner has a padded strip – like in a boxing ring. There’s an overlying fug of dismay and sadness and fear in the place. It makes him feel even emptier than he did before.

Handel has been arrested – there was a scuffle, but he’s been moved to an empty bedroom on Myrtle where he is waiting for a consultant to give him a psychiatric evaluation before he can be interviewed and charged. Caffery looks through a window and sees him sitting on his bunk, his hands in cuffs. His nose has bled all over the baggy jeans he’s wearing. He’s refused a medical exam, insisting he’s OK.

Melanie Arrow, meanwhile, is still in the seclusion room. Four members of Flea’s team stand at the door, the visors on their riot gear lifted. At their feet is a Stanley knife, bagged.

‘There’s blood,’ Caffery says, looking at it.

‘Yeah, but it hasn’t been used,’ replies one of the cops. ‘It just got in the way. Handel had a clout on the nose when we went in – there was a bit of claret floating around, got on to everything. Including this.’

‘How about her?’

‘Quiet. Compliant. She’s been asked if she wants to come out but says no, so I guess it’s an arrest sitch.’

‘Yes. Yes.’ All the way here Caffery’s been trying to work out what he can arrest her with. Usually in a case like this they’ll start with something easy to prove, then up the charge when the dust has settled and they’ve had time to think. He looks through the window. Melanie is sitting with her head lowered, as if she’s studying her hands. There are one or two spots of blood on her white blouse. More on the floor. It’s still a leap to believe what Jonathan Keay and AJ are telling him about her.

He opens the door. She raises her eyes calmly.

‘Hello,’ she says. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Melanie.’

‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

She lifts her face – a bright smile pasted there. Her eyes are blank. ‘You’re so kind. But I think on this occasion I’ll decline, if it’s all the same to you. I think I’ll just go home now.’

She gets to her feet and walks towards him as if it hasn’t even occurred to her that he might object. He puts a bit of width into his shoulders and moves his foot so he is blocking the door.

She stops a pace away from him and drops her head again. Studying his feet – trying to decide how on earth this obstacle came to be in her path.

‘I’d rather you came to the station,’ Caffery says. ‘I don’t think home is a good idea – under the circumstances.’

There’s a long pause. It is so quiet he can hear the breath whistling in and out of her nose. Then she says, in a voice straight from the Gloucester sink estate she grew up on: ‘And you don’t have any fucking right to be speaking to me like that.’

‘I’m being civil. Do you want to extend the same courtesy to me?’

‘This is my unit.’

‘You haven’t answered my question. Are you going to be civil?’

Melanie lifts her chin and spits at Caffery. It hits him on the eyebrow. Drips into his eye, stinging. He wants to wipe it off, but he doesn’t. He smiles.

‘Thank you for that. I’ve been trying to decide what I was going to arrest you for.’

IT’S KIND OF fitting that Halloween is coming – the time when pumpkins get scooped out and displayed – because that’s the way AJ feels just now. Like someone has ladled out every piece of hope and light and love his body could contain. What’s left in the place he was holding Melanie is nothing.

When Jack Caffery has accompanied her, cuffed and escorted by two cops, to a waiting car, the Big Lurch comes by and puts a hand on AJ’s arm. He squeezes it. Doesn’t say anything, but AJ gets the message. I understand. When you’re ready to talk, I’m here .

AJ nods. Mutters a ‘thank you’. The Big Lurch wanders off, leaving AJ standing helplessly in the corridor – not knowing what to do with himself, wishing he could sit down somewhere. He thinks about calling Patience. Then he imagines telling her what has happened. She’ll be sympathetic, but there will be an under-note of I told you so in her voice – and he can’t face that. Instead he finds himself back in his office, holding the crude picture Zelda drew – the first thing that sent him on the hunt for Isaac. And now he sees, as he runs his fingers over it, that it has been added to after the original drawing. The paint is higher and fresher than the rest.

He shakes his head. It’s like holding a kaleidoscope to your eye – growing more and more conscious of the intricate possibilities presented. Melanie – sweet, funny Melanie – is like a million different-coloured pieces of glass, reflecting back the colours the observer wants to see. She worked hard to get Handel’s tribunal to release him – hoping he’d walk out of the unit carrying all the stigma of The Maude with him. It never dawned on her that Isaac knew what she was doing.

AJ goes back to Myrtle Ward. Down the corridor to the room where Isaac Handel is sitting, waiting for a psychiatric appraisal before he can be taken into custody. AJ nods at the cop sitting outside, unlocks the door and enters.