Free Poppet by Mo Hayder Page A

the last flutter of heartbeat. Nothing. The little dog’s chin is down and the whiskers around her mouth are curled and brown where they touch her front leg.
    ‘Suki?’
    Penny looks at her watch again. Five minutes go by. Then another five. She makes herself count the seconds out in her head. All the way to a hundred and eighty. Three more minutes. Nothing, no one, can exist without breathing for this long. It is definitely the end.
    ‘OK.’ She rocks back on her heels. ‘OK.’
    She cries. Just a little, and has to hold up her sleeve to soak up the tears. There’d be more, but the heavy ones passed through yesterday morning, when the vet told her the end was coming.
    ‘I’m picking you up now.’ After a long time she bends at the waist and lifts Suki up on to her lap. The dog doesn’t move or resist. Her legs flop down. She weighs nothing – no more than a small wicker basket. Penny hunches down, puts her face against the old muzzle. Rocks her. ‘It’s all right, my girl. It’s OK. You’ve been so good. Such a good girl. Thank you,’ she tells her. ‘Thank you so so much. For everything.’

The Nobel Peace Prize
    AJ IS IN that place again. The cave, its walls as smooth and warm and glowing as polished walnut. The hole is there too, slightly to his right. There’s a slender strand of something – gossamer, or spider silk maybe – reaching into the hole, almost as if it’s pointing the way. He is certain that if he tugs on the strand every miracle on earth will be revealed to him, all in one cosmic white blast. But this time, just as he’s about to grip the strand, the babble of infant laughter comes to him. He jerks round to the cave opening. Something is out there. A familiar pitter-patter of feet. A shadow crosses the ground.
    He wakes, gulping in air. Breathing hard, his heart galloping, hands groping for something to hold on to.
    ‘Shit shit shit .’
    ‘AJ? You all right there, mate?’
    He blinks. The Big Lurch and one of the nurses are staring at him from the other sofa. He opens his mouth, struggles up on his elbows and stares blankly at them. He’s in the nurses’ TV room. The digital clock on the wall says nine forty-five. The TV is on. A woman wearing nothing but thigh-high boots is gyrating her pelvis, throwing her long blonde hair around like a whip.
    AJ groans and turns away into the damp-smelling sofa, his face in his hands. He shakes his head. He is so tired now it is beyond a joke. He wants to sleep but he can’t. He is going slowly, very slowly, mad. The lunatics are taking over the asylum, the system is feeding on its own young. He wishes he could wear a You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps T-shirt. Why is he stuck on this highway to hell of a career? There was a time he’d deluded himself he was going to change the world by caring for the patients, he even thought he was doing it to make Mum proud – make her believe her son was caring and thoughtful. Now he looks back at those rose-tinted days and thinks, without any humour, he should have gone to Specsavers.
    He’s seen the worst of human nature in this profession. He’s seen guys who’ve stabbed random little kids to death in the high street, he’s nursed a woman (long dead now) who killed her disabled husband by pouring a kettle of boiling water over his head and leaving him in his wheelchair for three days until he died of the burns and the infection – AJ’s heart used to gallop every time he saw her holding a cup of coffee; she was only allowed that after ten years on the unit. Then there was the guy who’d hacked up, cooked and eaten his neighbour’s pony because it was ‘looking at him strange’. And the AIDS sufferer who put his used needles pointing upwards in the sandpit at the local children’s playground. And so it goes, on and on.
    At some point he decided he didn’t want to know what someone was in the can for. He reckoned he’d nurse them better if he was none the wiser about the