Poppet by Mo Hayder Page B

pub. He’s wearing a paper hat and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. AJ studies his eyes, hunting for a hint, a trace of evidence of what was happening between him and Melanie. He can find none.
    He’s not at all sure why he went into her office just now. Does it matter to him what happened to Pauline and Moses and Zelda? Was he trying to show her that he cares what goes on in the unit? Stand proud, little soldier. Or was it because he wanted to find out the truth about Melanie and Jonathan Keay?
    He’s still asking himself when he leaves the unit, wondering about her. The thoughts would get lurid if he let them, but he’s old enough not to let them go that route. Instead he kids himself it’s natural professional concern for a colleague’s mental well-being. At home, Patience doesn’t complain that he’s late. She’s mellow, and especially forgiving when he gives her the Forager’s Fayre jam she likes. She clicks a jar open, sniffs and gives an approving cluck.
    ‘Like, like, like . Whoever it is makes this stuff uses good ingredients. I take my hat off to her.’
    ‘How do you know it’s a her and not a him ?’
    ‘Please,’ Patience says tolerantly. ‘Don’t make me say something sexist.’
    Breakfast is ready. On days when Patience has no produce from the garden to fry, poach or broil, she shops in Thornbury and does the sort of cooking her mother taught her – half Caribbean, half Deep South. Sometimes it’s saltfish and fritters, pancake towers with maple syrup and four miniature buttermilk scoops melting on top. Today it’s banana porridge followed by soft biscuits, gravy and link sausage. There’s Patience’s home-made lovage brandy too. Two or three thimblefuls in a ceramic flask with a steaming mug of black coffee out of the espresso pot on the Aga. He can drink coffee by the barrel load – even before he goes to sleep.
    He sits with Stewart at his foot and eats, using the biscuits to mop up the gravy. Biscuits. He’s always been a bit split-headed about biscuits: are they cookies or are they, like these, a kind of savoury scone? He doesn’t ask Patience because she’s fretting over the form on the Cheltenham Showcase. She and Mum had the betting habit – they both claimed it was passed down in the genes from their mother. AJ recalls the many long afternoons he spent as a small child, waiting outside the bookies’ in Thornbury while his mum and Patience went inside, armed with their purses and newspapers. He was too young to join them inside, so the two women would come out to compare the form with him, asking him what he thought. ‘You’re our lucky mascot,’ they’d laugh. Lucky, lucky.
    ‘So much for my inheritance,’ AJ says as he moves the sausages around the plate. ‘You put it all on Rude Boy to win at Wincanton.’
    Patience dumps the skillet down with a bang. He likes winding her up because she is fabulously tetchy on this subject. ‘Yes, and what’s your point?’
    ‘I dunno – I suppose you could have put it each way? At least you’d have covered your ass.’
    ‘There’s not enough money in the world to cover my butt,’ Patience says, straight-faced.
    ‘Stop being such a stereotype, Patience. You’re behaving like something out of Gone with the Wind . Talking like it too. You’re half white.’
    ‘So? Why should I stop? Give people what they expect, it makes life a whole lot simpler.’
    ‘Yes, but you’re only perpetuating negative images of your race.’
    ‘My half race. And that – what you just said – it’s all psychobabble. You got that from that place you work.’
    ‘It’s not psychobabble, it’s a vernacular far more rooted in the sociological sciences than in psychology,’ he says loftily. ‘And I didn’t get it from the unit. You can pick up a comment like that on any street corner.’
    Aunt Patience can’t answer him when he starts talking that way, so she gives a big stage yawn, and turns away to check her texts. That’s how