Poppet

  She checks her wrist. The dive computer she has strapped there is her private, clandestine unit – it is kept under lock and key when she’s not using it. If it got into the wrong hands the records of the illicit dives she’s logged on it could cause serious trouble.

  She gets to the first milestone – the fifty-metre mark, and dabs a little compressed air into the vest to slow the descent. Get her neutral buoyancy back and level out. Her ear is good. So far at least.

  It takes a bit of searching with her underwater torch to find the gateway. A net emblazoned with warning signs: DEPTHS EXCEEDING 50 METRES. DO NOT DIVE BEYOND YOUR QUALIFICATIONS AND CAPABILITIES. Set there to discourage recreational divers from pushing into uncharted depths. This is the threshold. The doorway to hell. You cannot and must not predict what happens past here.

  The cold is going to slow her thinking, so she works methodically, rigidly adhering to the routine, taking her time: using a torch to check depth, air supply, duration – comparing it religiously to her dive plan. There’s the slightest pain in her ear, spreading over her temples into her eye. It might just be the tightness of the mask, which hasn’t been used in months, but if the pain gets any worse she’ll have to head to the surface. There’s no nausea yet, and that has to be a good sign.

  Two short snaps on the valve. Automatic. Then she tips herself forward until she is prone, suspended in mid-water, one hand on the net to steady herself. She pushes it aside, squirms her legs over it, and lets herself sink even further, feet first, her hands at her sides.

  The rock face comes at her suddenly out of the gloom. She grabs on to it and, rotating ninety degrees, so her body is flat against the rock, feels her way, crab-like, down the quarry, examining the rock wall with one gloved hand, skimming over the moss and lichen.

  Below her the quarry continues to drop. What she’s looking for is halfway between here and the quarry floor. Every metre she must descend, the greater the pressure on her ear – the more the chance of disaster.

  At sixty metres she stops. There’s just blackness and the magnified sound of her own breathing. You never think about the amount of water overhead – if you did, you’d go mad. The entrance is somewhere here. She hangs on tightly, keeping those breaths steady. She studies everything in the beam of her torch, trying to recall the secret striations and signature formations. Her heart is thumping but she slows her breathing wilfully. Panic is the prime reason people die at depths such as this. Breathing consistently is everything.

  Her hand finds it before her dive torch does: a small crevice that marks the upper edge of the hole. The entrance is sufficiently wide for two divers in full gear.

  It’s only further in that it gets really narrow. No one would find this if they didn’t know what they were looking for. No matter how skilled.

  A wah wah wah noise pounds in her ears. Maybe the first sign something’s going to go wrong. She ignores it. This is the deepest she will go tonight – from here on it is upwards. Even if someone did, in the unlikeliest of scenarios, happen on this entrance, they wouldn’t dare to go further. The ascent through the chimney is ragged with danger – toppling boulders, sweeping debris and clay into the shaft, trailing roots that could hook the cylinders right off your back, shards of rock that could puncture a buoyancy jacket. But at least it’s upwards all the way; it will give her body a chance to recover from the extreme pressure.

  She knocks out a few more shallow breaths to make herself sink further, then uses her fingers to propel herself inside the cave. She moves on, following the slope of the floor, torch pointing up, until it locates the next opening overhead: the entrance to the narrow chimney. The bubbles from her regulator shoot upwards in a silvery haze – collecting in the various overhanging crags and ledges above her. When they get big enough, they spring away from the walls, racing up the chimney after the others. Disappearing. She knows where they will eventually break the surface, forty-six metres over her head. If only she could get messages from those bubbles about what’s up there. Whether anything has changed. What is waiting for her.

  The dive computer on her wrist now says sixty-three metres. A bad bad depth. She positions herself so she is standing at the foot of the chimney, raises one hand over her head, and releases a jet of compressed air into her vest. Slowly she begins to rise, following the gas bubbles. It’s a strange feeling of lightness – as if she’s heading for the sky.

  Forty-five metres. Her first scheduled decompression stop. She halts, hands braced against the rock. The pain in her ears has lessened. She’s through. She’s through. She’s done it. Her ears have held up and she’s past the first hurdle.

  Sliding Into Each Other

  IT’S FOUR IN the morning when the security light comes on outside Melanie’s window.

  AJ is already awake. He’d had that dream again – the one where he was about to slip down a rabbit hole into heaven – and was lying on his back, eyes open, listening to Melanie’s soft breathing. His mind was rambling – he was thinking about so many things. About Isaac. About what he did at Upton Farm, killing his parents. And only a few miles away from Eden Hole.

  Life was wonderful, but it was also deeply weird. He glanced down at Melanie, fast asleep. He still couldn’t believe how easy and obvious the decision was – how simply they’d just slid into each other’s existences. He wasn’t alone any more. Maybe he never would be again.

  Then the light came on.

  At first he doesn’t move. He can see insects circling in its beam, all juiced up and busy now the rain has stopped. It’s like summer has come back, seeing those flies. Not late autumn.

  Silently he throws off the covers and pads barefoot across the room. As he reaches the window the security light clicks out. But not before he catches a glimpse, just a split second, of a figure in the garden.

  It’s over so quickly it’s like a mirage – a burst on his retina. He blinks, trying to adjust to the suddenly dark garden. Not sure what he saw. Has he made it up or did the figure have a smooth white face? No facial contours. And a hint of laced gown.

  ‘AJ?’ Melanie murmurs sleepily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He opens the window and leans out. In the gardens the shadows are beginning to coalesce, turn into something recognizable.

  ‘AJ?’

  ‘Shhhhhhhhhh!’

  He holds his breath and leans out further, listening to the garden. He can hear little noises in the trees but nothing specific – maybe a rustle of leaf, a tiny snap of twig. Or maybe it’s just the drip drip of last night’s rain. The dark path in the grass from yesterday is still there – he can’t tell if it’s been made afresh.

  ‘What did you see?’ Melanie comes to stand next to him. She stares out into the garden, her eyes watery with apprehension. ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looks up at him. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He crosses to the bathroom and switches on the light. He puts his head under the tap and lets the water fall over him. He doesn’t want to speak to her for a moment. The doors downstairs are all locked. He double-checked them before they came to bed. And he made sure the windows were locked too. The torch – the heavy thing that he could swing at someone should he need to – is next to the bed.

  He wets a flannel and runs it over his hair, around the back of his neck. He’s remembering Isaac staring at Melanie, saying ‘Where does she live? Where does she live?’

  He turns off the tap and pulls a towel off the rail, putting his face in it. When he lowers the towel he sees she has moved to the bed and is sitting there, watching him silently through the doorway.

  ‘AJ?’ she says, and this time he can’t get away from her. ‘AJ?’

  ‘Mel – how much do you know about why Isaac was in Beechway?’

  ‘I know everything. I’m the clinical director – it’s my job to know.’

  ‘You’re not scared?’

  She blinks. ‘He was ill when he offended
, we successfully rehabilitated him. Why would I be scared?’

  ‘It hasn’t occurred to you it might have been Isaac in the garden just now? That he might know where you live?’

  She swallows. ‘I didn’t see what you saw.’

  ‘No, but you saw something last night.’

  ‘I was dreaming.’

  ‘No, you weren’t. I’m sorry – but we both know what I’m talking about and it’s beyond crazy now. I want to go to the police.’

  ‘AJ, please.’ Melanie makes a pained face. ‘You’re talking about something that is going to lose me my job. And I just can’t let that happen. I’m sorry – I fought for my job. I had to …’ She sighs. ‘I really had to fight. I can’t lose it. It’s all I’ve got.’

  AJ doesn’t answer. He drops the towel and goes downstairs. Checks all the locks. When he comes back upstairs Melanie is in bed with her back to him. He lies beside her, listens to her breathing. Eventually it slows. She’s either asleep or pretending to be. AJ stays awake, alert for every sound, every creak in the woods outside.

  Crash and Burn

  FLEA CAN’T AFFORD to ignore any of the safety stops. Especially diving alone and deeper than she’s qualified. She climbs the chimney, monitoring herself rigidly. It’s been such a long ascent a lot of the nitrogen has seeped out of her muscles and joints. This, the last decompression stop, is only five metres below the surface, but it’s the most important of all. She wedges herself in the tube and wills the minutes away, impatient to be moving again. After a hundred breaths – each one counted with the concentration of a Zen master – she opens her eyes and clicks on her torch.

  Above her the chimney widens. A faint hiss as her jacket inflates, and she begins to rise. One hand is raised, as it always is on an ascent, to protect her from unseen obstacles above, the other is on her regulator, held at an angle so she can see her wrist computer clicking off the last few metres. Her cylinders scrape briefly against the rock wall. Two more metres, then the chimney opens and she bobs like a cork to the surface of the water.

  It’s a massive cave, twelve metres high; part of the complex of Roman lead mines.

  She lifts her dive torch up out of the hole and plonks it on the cave floor. She’s tested the air before and knows it is safe to breathe, so she pulls off her mask and rests, arms on the edge, head on her hands, breathing hard. She’s done it. No problems with her ear – she puts a finger in there and wriggles it. Mr Doctor, I can tell you before I even see you – the ears are perfect. Epic, in fact. Good to nearly sixty-five metres – beat that!

  When the strength returns to her arms she boosts herself out of the hole, her chest and legs screaming after the long minutes braced against the shaft of the chimney. Quickly she strips off her weight belt and cylinders, picks up the torch. It has been battered in the ascent, but it’s still working. She shines the beam around the cavern. The black walls glitter like anthracite: lead ore and galena, mined from the Mendip Hills since the first millennium. The one person who knew about this place has long gone – it’s as silent and undisturbed as it was the last time she was here.

  She bends to take off her fins.

  A high squeak comes from behind her; she snatches up the torch and pivots, sweeping the beam over the northern wall of the cave, sees twin circular reflections. A rat. It sits back on its haunches, contemplating her, then turns and ambles away – flowing off into the darkness. An answering squeak and patter of paws. Impossible in the echo-chamber of the cave to say which direction they’re coming from, but from the different pitch and tone she’s sure the place is teeming with them. There are boreholes the rats can come through – they’ve been here since she can remember. Their presence means nothing at all. Nothing has changed.

  Jamming the dive torch under one arm, she rips off her second fin and in her thin dive boots picks her way deeper into the cave, the torch out in front of her. Glinting dully in the beam of light, she finds a long narrow ridge of blackish stones, like a keloid scar. You wouldn’t notice this unless you knew exactly what you were looking for – unless you were combing the place from top to bottom. Under this unremarkable scatter of stones are Misty’s remains. Flea crouches and digs with her hands until she finds the edge of the dirty plastic sheeting. Her heart gives a little relieved skip to find it’s exactly as she left it.

  The plastic is dirty. She pulls it away and shines the torch on what is inside. In life Misty Kitson was a well-fleshed, well-tanned and highlighted young woman. A beauty, according to some newspapers. Body of the year, according to Nuts magazine. Time, though, has boiled her down. It’s stripped her of skin and features and fat and muscle. Her golden hair is now a few scraps pasted to a crackling yellowing skull. Her bones have accordioned in on themselves. Her shin bone lies on the right of her skull and her ribcage has toe bones resting on it. Amazing that a full-grown woman could be parcelled up so small – just a tiny package. A human.

  Flea examines the plastic. It’s been gnawed in places where rats have got in. Caffery obviously hasn’t thought this part of it through. Misty’s bones are going to have a completely different forensic signature after being left here, wrapped in plastic, than if her body had decayed out in the woods. He’s overlooked the artefacts left by animals on the body. Animals can change a human corpse into something utterly unrecognizable – it doesn’t take long.

  She turns the torch in the direction of the chimney – then back to the remains, measuring the distance. She could parcel this up, make it watertight, and take Misty to the surface. Open a box that doesn’t need to be opened. She could, but she’s not going to. It’s OK. No one is going to come here – no one is going to find this. She can keep on flying.

  She refolds the plastic and begins to pile the stones on top.

  I am so sorry, Misty. Sorry for you, and sorry for your mum. I know what it is to lose someone and have nothing to put in a grave, but for now I can’t. It’s not my time to crash and burn.

  Not now. Maybe never.

  Yellow

  MELANIE AND AJ have reached an impasse. So early in their relationship and they’re as wary and mistrustful of each other as divorcees. They are wooden at breakfast, hardly speaking. He’s surprised and taken aback at the way she has pulled down the shutters, and he believes she’s embarrassed by it now. He’s known a lot of women who’ve risen through the ranks to a position of power; many find staying there incredibly difficult. It’s as if they are so surprised to have got there at all that they cling on harder than they need to.

  He loads his breakfast stuff into the dishwasher and goes into the garden again – just to see it in the daylight. He doesn’t know what he’s searching for, so he kicks around a bit, trying to look important, then goes back inside. He keeps catching her watching him, and when he thinks her attention is elsewhere he, in turn, studies her. Searching for any hint she’s going to tell him she doesn’t want to go on with this – that she wants to cool things. He won’t be surprised when it happens. It’ll be because she’s embarrassed – the worst reason, but she has her pride.

  By the time they get to work AJ is wrung out. He is exhausted, and the memory of whatever it was in the garden won’t leave him alone. Flashes of it come back to him when he closes his eyes: a face covered in something – a stocking mask maybe. Its absolute stillness and lack of urgency – so motionless that he still can’t quite believe it was a human being – are the worst things. The image won’t stop pressing at him, and eventually he gives in. He lets it take him the first place it will. He isn’t surprised to find himself outside Monster Mother’s door.

  Monster Mother sits in the window as always. She is holding her stump high above her head. There seems no particular reason for her doing this; she neither tires of it, nor refers to it when AJ comes in, but smiles graciously, half rising to give him a tiny bobbing curtsey, twitching the hem of her floaty yellow lace with her good hand, the stump still raised aloft.

  ‘Gabriella.’

  ‘Hello, dearest AJ. The world
is extremely yellow today.’

  ‘Yellow as in … ?’

  ‘As in sunny.’ She settles down, beaming. The arm stays up in the air, cheerfully revealing the huge thatch of gingery hair in her armpit. ‘The world is happy.’

  ‘Happy because …?’

  ‘Because it’s gone. The Maude will leave us alone now. We’re safe. Ohhhh, AJ.’ She turns her amazing eyes to him. They are eyes that could light up the world. ‘It’s all because of you. You are so lovely. You’re the favourite of all my children. You grew up the straightest – the straightest of them all.’

  AJ gives a wan smile. Isaac Handel has gone from the unit and now Monster Mother is happy. It’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. ‘Can I sit down?’

  ‘Of course, my lovely son.’ Monster Mother still hasn’t lowered her arm. ‘Sit, sit. Do you want some tea? Some cakes? Strawberry is nice.’

  Monster Mother has the wherewithal to make neither tea nor cakes in her room, but AJ inclines his head politely. ‘That’s OK, Gabriella. I’ve just eaten, thank you.’ He sits. Takes a breath. ‘Gabriella? Do you think Isaac knows something about The Maude?’

  Instantly Monster Mother’s mood changes. A cloud flits across her face and she lowers her stump.

  ‘Gabriella?’

  She moves her tongue around in her mouth, as if she’s having an internal argument with herself. Her eyes flicker from side to side.

  ‘Gabriella? I asked, do you—’

  ‘I gave birth to him – how am I supposed to forget? I don’t forget any of you. I still cry because of Isaac.’ She pauses and mutters to herself, her eyes lowered to a point on the floor, as if there is something or someone there she is speaking to. Finally she jerks her head up and looks hard at AJ. ‘Where is he?’