Poppet

The Bath

AJ’S HEAD IS misbehaving – leaping all over the places he doesn’t want it to leap. If he’s not thinking about whether Melanie’s still got feelings for Jonathan Keay, he’s wondering why DI Caffery hasn’t called. Not that AJ expects him to, but he’d like some sort of contact. And an update. That conversation they had keeps plaguing him: Do you really not know what happened at Upton Farm …

The moment he and Melanie get to work, AJ makes an excuse and goes straight to Handel’s room. It still hasn’t been turned round for the next admission off the acute ward. He unlocks the door, goes in, and locks the door behind him before anyone sees. The rooms in the pre-discharge ward are designed for low-risk patients ready to move either out into the community or to be referred on to medium-secure units. The patients have furniture and can put up posters. Some risk-evaluated patients even have baths in their en suites. Handel was allowed a tub and coat hangers and a spotlight above his bed for reading.

A start has been made on preparing the room for the next occupant. The cleaning equipment has been brought up here and left in the corner. There are two bin liners full of rubbish sitting under the window. AJ squats and starts going through the contents. Nothing too odd: the usual assortment of sweet-wrappers, a mouldy apple, magazines and old underwear.

The patients are very good at hiding things away – and it’s rarely the sort of things one might expect, like cigarettes or drugs. Quite often it’s food. AJ’s lost count of the number of treasure troves of mouldering cake and pizza he’s found tucked away in pillowcases, in the backs of wardrobes, even stuffed into trainers with the laces tied neatly over the top. Sometimes it’s dirty clothes they’ve attached a random significance to. Once he found an old-fashioned ceramic sewing thimble that had been packed to the brim with a thick sticky substance. He’d put the tip of a biro into it and dug around for several seconds before he realized it was the patient’s collection of ear wax.

It’s a charmed life this, working at Beechway.

Having gone through the contents of the bin bags and found nothing that means anything to him, AJ sits on the mattress and glances around. The walls are bare apart from a few dabs of Blu-tack where Isaac’s posters have been taken down. The curtains are torn in one place – he must make a note of that and get a works requisition into Maintenance. The door to Isaac’s shower room is open, and AJ’s attention is drawn to the tap in the basin, which is dripping steadily.

The bathrooms are designed to be indestructible, with no ‘ligature points’ – i.e. nowhere the patient can hang him or herself. All the taps and handles are curved down towards the floor. These bathrooms are black holes of dread to the nursing staff. It is rare to go into one and find the toilet unused. And then there is the usual careless detritus of human functions – tissues glued together with snot, and, in the case of the men, other bodily secretions. Pubic hair, scabs, vomit. Even the most fastidious OCD patients seem to have a blind spot when it comes to bathrooms.

He stares into the room for a long time, the cogs in his head turning slowly. Then he gets up and crosses to the bathroom door, switches on the light.

Thankfully the cleaning crew have been through already – it smells of bleach and the light reflects off the newly cleaned sink. The window looks out over to the admin unit, where one or two lighted windows can be seen. The skies are clouded and low, threatening rain. It’s as dark out there as if it was evening. AJ uses his toe to give the bath panel a quick push. It bends then bounces back with a loud whoomp. He crouches and runs his hand around the edge where the plastic meets the bathtub. His forefinger finds the breech – up in the top-right-hand corner, at the end where the taps are, the panel is missing a bracket.

He fumbles his keys out from his trouser pocket and, using the passive security fob, which is a rigid slab of plastic, he carefully pries the top corner of the panel away from the bath and peers inside. The fibreglass bottom of the bathtub is visible, but not much more. He gets out his mobile phone, and opens the torch app. Pushing his right hand in between the panel and the bath, he uses his arm to increase the space, then shines the torch into the dark.

Something is wedged down there. A large holdall with ‘Adidas’ written on it. He grits his teeth – stretches for it, catching the handle on the tip of his finger and dragging it closer. He won’t be able to pull it out intact – he’ll have to open it and empty the contents while it’s still behind the panel. When the bag is close enough, he shifts position so he can keep the phone light shining on it and get leverage on the zip.

He pulls the zip back, feeling the soft tick tick tick of the slider bumping along the teeth. There’s a smell coming out of the bag – a smell of old laundry. You only have to work in a place like this for one day to learn that patients will store the strangest of things in the strangest of places – you never put your hands anywhere you can’t see first. So he nudges the phone closer and squints through the gap.

What he sees makes him hurriedly pull his hand out. The bath panel snaps closed with a loud crack and he sits back, breathing hard.