Poppet by Mo Hayder Read Free Book Online Page B

fact he’s a past master. When Winnie Johnson, mother of the missing Moors victim, died not knowing where her son was buried, Caffery took the day off work and sat in his kitchen, staring out of the window. He’s lived in the same hole as her and Jacqui for years. And years.
    In Caffery’s case it isn’t a son or a daughter – it’s a brother. Maybe that’s why he keeps it so close to his chest. The rest of the world understands that the loss of a child can never be overcome, but the loss of a brother? After thirty-five years? He should have got over it by now. There have been plenty of clues, plenty of avenues he’s nosed up, but none of them has led him to that tangible evidence – the body. Maybe if he had a body to bury he’d get rid of that itch. That constant, plaguing voice. He understands Jacqui so much better than she knows.
    He stares at the angel. For a reason he can’t define he knows it’s the grave of a child. He half raises his hand to open the gate, then stops himself. He stands, stock-still, his heart thudding.
    Cross that bridge, Jack. Just fucking do it.

Patience and Stewart
    USUALLY WHEN AJ leaves the unit he can forget about the place. Not today. Today as he drives home, through the drizzle and morning rush-hour traffic, he keeps going back there in his head. Keeps seeing that smooth face from the nightmare, the constriction in his chest. Keeps re-enacting the later conversation with Melanie.
    He wonders, not for the first time, what Zelda Lornton’s postmortem report is going to say. Any death in the unit has, by law, to be investigated by the police and an external review team. The superintendent who took the job admits there’s been a bit of a fire in the coroner’s office over who’s going to do the autopsy. Zelda’s death didn’t strike the coroner as being odd enough to warrant an expensive full-scale post-mortem by a Home Office pathologist, but the ordinary hospital doctors have been reluctant to take on the responsibility of cutting open a patient who has died unexpectedly on a psychiatric unit. The examination has been a hot potato that bounced around the Flax Bourton mortuary like a ping-pong ball until someone put their foot down and insisted one of the pathologists did it as a coroner’s ‘special’ post-mortem – something, apparently, halfway between an ordinary PM and a forensic PM. That was three days ago and they’re still waiting to hear.
    Maybe the coroner is right. Zelda was young, but she was very overweight – over twenty stone – and inactive. Considered from that perspective, she was an unsurprising candidate. Enormously lazy, she was pushed everywhere in a wheelchair though she was quite capable of walking. Her clothing strained at the seams and the staff had to rub Vaseline into the folds on her legs to stop her getting sores. Her clothes consisted of seven red T-shirts and seven grey pairs of joggers and seven pairs of red socks. She would wear nothing else, even when she began to outgrow them and they’d been stitched so often they were more darning thread than fabric. Anything beyond eating and watching television was an abuse of Zelda’s rights. She was a habitual blamer of the system; the staff lost track of the times they were accused of abusing/molesting/raping her. No one argued with her, though many would have liked to. She could tip the mood of the entire ward on its head – everyone responded to her. Everyone walked on a knife-edge.
    AJ cannot, will not, ever pretend he liked Zelda. But as he gets to the end of the narrow country lane where he lives, he finds he can’t get rid of the image of her that night with her arms bloodied. All the rebellion taken out of her. And the words, ‘Someone … some thing .’
    He pulls on the handbrake and switches off the engine. Lets the silence leak in. There’s not much to look at here – only the spread of the Severn flood plain, Berkeley Castle, the glorious view of the decommissioned