Ritual (21 page)

'You didn't get all the way. That's why we couldn't find you.'

'Now listen, Flea. They didn't find us last time, but this time they will. This time they're going to find us . . .'

'This time?'

Flea reached out again, into the silt. She couldn't see her mother any more and that made her panic.

'It's important, Flea, so important.
Don't let
them bring us to the surface
. Can you hear me?'

'Mum?
Mum?
' Tears were backing up in her throat. 'Mum? Come back. Please.'

'Don't let them bring us out of the Hole, whatever happens. Leave us. Just leave us.'

'Don't go, Mum.
Mummy
. . .'

But the silt blocked out everything, even the voice, and there was mud in her mouth and dirty water washing through her body and the nausea came back. It sent her spinning round – it was worse than any narcosis or CO2 overload she'd known, and she had to open her eyes and grip the sofa. Above her the ceiling was whirling out of control, the grubby yellow light-fitting twirling like a centrifuge, the daylight flashing in and out of her eyes, and she could hear a strange noise, a high-pitched whimpering coming from her mouth. She tried to sit up but as she did so she knew she was going to be sick.

'Ohmigod,' she muttered. 'Ohmigod.'

She just managed to get to the bowl Kaiser had put out and hung there, heaving and crying, until it was over and she was back in her body, crouched, a long line of saliva connecting her to the bowl, her mother's voice disappearing, as if into a long tunnel, behind her:
Whatever happens
. . . leave us
. . .

'The one thing Jack Caffery still hasn't told me is why it's me he wants to see. I'm not a clairvoyant or a mind-reader. I have no magical powers – no eyes like a god's. But I don't think it's police business brought you here.'

'It's not police business. It's my business.'

'And what business is that?'

Caffery rubbed his nose. The day had been weird. That some people would pay to have human blood in their house was beyond him. But with the earthenware bowl being tested at HQ and surveillance on Mabuza, he'd come to the end of what he could do at work. He'd tried going home to sleep, but he couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was watching him, that the shadows around the house were all wrong, so he'd got into the car and come looking for the Walking Man. He hadn't expected to find him so quickly. And he hadn't expected the Walking Man to start so quickly at pulling out the truth.

'Jack Caffery?' The Walking Man was wearing his sheepskin slippers. He had stuffed each of his boots with a piece of cloth and now he tied them inside a plastic carrier-bag and wedged them into a small ditch that ran along the hedgerow. He wiped his hands. 'I'm asking you a question, Jack Caffery. What is your business?'

Caffery looked at the fire, at the way some of the logs at the bottom had white and red crusts of heat like scabs. 'Someone went,' he said eventually. 'Someone was taken. Out of my life.'

'Your daughter?'

'No, no. Not my daughter. I've got no kids. Never will have.'

'Your woman?'

'No, I left her. Two months ago. Walked out on her.'

'Then who?'

'My brother. This was back in the . . .' He trailed off. 'It was a long time ago.'

'When you were children?'

'Yeah – it was. It was back in London. We . . . Well, you know how it is.' He held his fingers in the cavity behind his lower jawbone, pressing lightly because he'd learned it was one way to stop himself crying. 'We, uh, we never found him. Everyone knew who'd taken him, but the police, they couldn't get anything to stick.' He swallowed and took his hand from his throat, holding up his thumb to the firelight, turning it round and round. 'On the day he went missing I got a bruise on my thumbnail that wouldn't budge. It should have grown out but it didn't. No one could explain it, not the doctors, no one.' He gave a sad smile. 'I used to look at it, all those years, and think that the day I found my brother my nail would start growing again. But look at it.'

He held it out. The Walking Man straightened and came back, on his slippered feet, to peer at the nail.

'Nothing to see.'

'Nearly four years ago. After all that time it suddenly started growing again. The bruise grew out. And with it the feeling went. The feeling for the place it had happened went – just like that. It vanished, as if I'd been told the answer wasn't where I was – in south-east London – but somewhere else.'

'Here?'

'I don't know. The countryside – maybe here, maybe somewhere else.' He dropped his hand and stared at the lights of Bristol, thinking about the east, about Norfolk.

'Something else happened,' the Walking Man said. 'Four years ago something else happened.'

'Maybe.' Caffery shrugged. 'I think I came close to finding him – that's all.'

'Someone died. I think that happened too.' The Walking Man took two or three breaths. 'At the time you lost the connection, I think someone died.'

Caffery nodded. 'Yes,' he said quietly. 'Someone died too.'

'Yes?'

'The one who did it. Penderecki. Ivan Penderecki. He died. Suicide. If you're wondering.'

'I wasn't.' The Walking Man prodded at the fire.

Several minutes went by while Caffery tried to shift this new idea round his head, that maybe Penderecki's death had severed his connection. He'd never asked himself that before. Then the Walking Man spoke again, his voice completely different. 'What,' he said quietly, 'was his name?'

Caffery was caught off balance. No one had asked him that in years. They just referred to him as 'your brother', or 'he', as if they thought his name would be too awful to say. 'It was . . . Ewan.'

'Ewan,' said the Walking Man. 'Ewan.'

The way he said the name, gently, as if he was speaking it to a child made Caffery's throat close. He had to press his finger under his jaw again until the feeling passed and he could breathe. He opened a jar of cider, drank a little and pulled his coat collar up round his ears. He gazed at the stars and let himself think, not about Ewan but about Flea at the dockside, cupping someone else's hand in hers and looking up at him, as if she was saying: 'Don't worry, I can take care of this. You go and sit – go and be with yourself for a bit.' For a reason he couldn't explain he wanted to rest on that look in her eyes.

He reached into his pocket for the small brown bag. The crocus bulbs inside were little grainy balls with papery brown skin that slipped off as he touched it. As the Walking Man pulled on his socks, Caffery held out his hand, the bag sitting on his flat palm, the firelight making the dark shapes inside the brown paper glow like coals.

The Walking Man stopped. He stared at the bag for a while. Then, without a word he stood and took it. He pulled out a bulb and held it up to the light, turning it in his blackened fingers.

'The Remembrance.' He examined it reverently, as if it had a message written across its sides. 'When it comes out, the Remembrance, it's a perfect Delft blue. Just a little orange down in the centre, like an egg yolk. Or a star.'

He put the bulb back into the bag and poked his finger around a bit, like a kid counting sweets on a Saturday-morning street corner. Then he folded the top carefully and tucked the bag into the breast pocket of the filthy coat he wore and, as if nothing had happened, went on stoking the fire.

They didn't speak for a few minutes. Caffery drank cider and watched the Walking Man begin his nightly ritual, taking off his clothes and wrapping them, putting them under the sleeping-bag where they wouldn't attract any moisture. At night he wore specially designed sleepwear. It was filthy, but you could tell it was expensive, hi-tech, from one of those extreme-sports suppliers. There was an O
³
logo that Caffery recognized from Flea's dry suit. When he'd finished, the Walking Man pulled on his coat and began to potter around again, feeding the fire for the night.

Caffery knew his time there was almost over. 'Look,' he said, clearing his throat, 'I've given you what you wanted. Now you – it's your turn. You have to tell me what it was like, what you did to Craig Evans.'

'In my time. In my time.'

'You said you'd tell me.'

The Walking Man snorted. 'I said,
in my time
. I need to think about you first.' He threw another log on to the fire, then brushed off his hands. 'Tell me, what do you see when you look into the faces of those girls? Those prostitutes you don't sleep with enough.'

Caffery frowned. He had to pick up his tobacco pouch and roll a cigarette before he answered. 'I don't look,' he said, lighting it. 'I try not to see. I mean, whatever happens, I don't want to see my own reflection.'

'Yes – because if you see it do you know what you're really seeing?'

'No.'

'You're seeing death.'

'Death?'

'Yes. Death. Oh, you've still got a choice. But at the moment the choice you're making is the same as mine.'

'The same
choice
? I'm not making any of the same choices as you.'

The Walking Man smiled and tossed the last log on to the fire. 'Yes, you are. And for now you've chosen death. Yes. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for death.'

Caffery opened his mouth to say something, but the Walking Man's words stopped him. He sat there, his mouth still half open.

The Walking Man laughed at his face. 'I know. A shock, isn't it, when you first turn round and see the bridge you're crossing? A shock to realize you're giving up on life. That what you're really hoping for is death.'

Caffery closed his mouth. 'No. That's wrong. I'm not the same as you.'

'Yes, you are Jack Caffery, Policeman. You're exactly the same as I am. The only difference is that my eyes are open.' He used his filthy thumb and forefinger to open the lids, revealing the reddish tops and bottoms of the eyeballs. He was suddenly monstrous in the firelight, every night monster, every chimera. 'See? I'm not looking the other way. I
know
I'm trying to die. And you?' He laughed. '
You
don't even suspect it yet.'

Once, when Caffery had first started living with Rebecca in his family's three-bedroom terrace house in south-east London, after a particular bastard of an argument, she'd taken his face in her hands and said, in a voice that was tender, not angry: 'Jack, sometimes being with you isn't like being with someone who's still alive. It's like being with someone who's dying.'

For four years he'd kept those words contained somewhere in the back of his head, trying not to forget them but trying harder not to think about them too much, so they got like a memory of her perfume, or a half-remembered tune. Then, of course, along came the Walking Man and jumpstarted the memory.

It had opened something in him. It was as if a new channel had appeared in his head, making the back of his neck ache. Somehow, without understanding how, he knew the Walking Man would point to Keelie and the other girls on City Road and say they were about death, about him hoping for death. And then he'd point directly at Caffery's job. 'And as for that,' he'd say, 'more than anything else
that
is about your death.'

The next morning in his Kingswood office, a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the convenience store on the desk as he opened the orange courier's package that had come overnight from Marilyn, Caffery was thinking about his job, thinking about it as a kind of death. Marilyn had scribbled a note to him on a bit of Met stationery: 'Call if you need any more ADVICE Love M x.'

'Thanks, Marilyn,' he said, with a wry smile. He crumpled up the paper and was about to put it into the bin, then changed his mind. He found Sellotape and taped it to the wall so that Marilyn could do what she'd always wanted to do – monitor him constantly. Then he went back to the package, slowly pulling out the various wallets and bound folders. There was everything in here he could want: photocopied theses on African ritual; a folder of newspaper cuttings about Adam, the boy in the Thames; a list of contacts at universities in the UK and abroad. One, he noticed, was in Bristol. There was also a disk labelled 'Swalcliffe.pdf' in a clear pink cover. An Adobe Acrobat presentation. He slotted it into the computer.

Marilyn, he decided, as the Metropolitan Police logo came up on the screen, had put this together herself. She'd been a HOLMES inputter when they'd worked together and she'd always loved her computers. It was designed as a lecture, with bigger files appended to the presentation through hyperlinks, and that morning, as the sun got higher in the sky, as the Kingswood station came to life around him and people came and went from the shops outside his window, he silently blessed Marilyn for her nerdishness. In two hours he learned more than he'd ever known about a continent that had been a mystery to him for years.

Muti
, like she'd said, was a much bigger picture than he'd imagined. It started on the ground with witch doctors 'throwing the bones', casting sacred objects, bones, beans or stones, in a circle to divine the needs of the client. From the witch doctor's divination sprang the remedy, and of these the list was bewildering: there was bushbaby fur for babies who cried too much, chitons to stop your partner cheating on you, pangolin, porcupine fish, aardvark claw. Every part of almost every animal, it seemed, had a place in
muti
.

Caffery tried to read the page to the end, but the words blurred after twenty entries so he went back to the main lecture. When he clicked on it, he knew instantly he'd moved into a darker place: human body parts. The first thing that came up was a picture of a human skull, laid out on a pathologist's table, a measuring tape next to it. He read the text carefully, giving it time to sink in. Most
muti
human body parts were stolen from corpses, but the
muti
from the already dead was weak compared to that from the living: the medicine would be more powerful if the victim was alive when the mutilation happened, the louder the screams the better, and of the living by far the most powerful medicine came from a child. It was all about purity.

He looked away from the screen, suddenly overloaded, his eyes tired. He took time to spoon some sugar into his coffee and watch it make a little island and slowly sink. Vaguely, he remembered hearing that in South Africa six men had been charged with raping a nine-month-old baby, believing that sex with it would cure them of AIDS. The thought made parts of his mind ache.

The next section of the lecture defined the difference between human sacrifice, in which the death of the person was the most important thing and would appease a deity, and
muti
murder, where the aim was the harvest of body parts for use in traditional medicine.
Brains endow the
client with knowledge. The breasts and genitals of
either sex bestow virility. A nose or eyelid can be
used to poison an enemy
. The next slide showed a piece of severed flesh lying on a towel. It wasn't until he read the caption that he understood what he was looking at.
A penis can bring success in
horse-racing
.

'Christ,' he muttered, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. He'd have liked a whisky instead of the coffee, but if he let himself have one there'd be another on the heels of the first and before he knew it the day would be in the toilet. He scrolled down, looking for mention of human blood, but there was nothing, so, thinking of his visit to Rochelle's, he searched for the Tokoloshe.

At first he put in the wrong spelling, TOCKALOSH, and the search engine came up with zero. He tried two more spellings, then TOKOLOSHE and this time the computer blinked and whirred and came up with a result. He found the section and had read a short way through when he had the urge to stand and pull the blind down because suddenly he didn't feel comfortable in the office and he didn't like the way he could be seen by anyone on the street.

A Tokoloshe, the Acrobat file told him, was a sprite, a witch's familiar. Left to its own devices it was no more than a nuisance, but if it came under the power of a witch it became a danger, a thing feared and reviled. As Rochelle had said, some believed a bowl of human blood would appease a Tokoloshe, but there were other ways of protecting yourself: a cat, or an image of a cat washing its face, was enough to keep it at bay, or you could cover your skin with grease made from Tokoloshe fat, which you could buy from a witch doctor. Marilyn had scanned in an article about two men in South Africa arrested on an armed robbery. In their car the police had found a human skull with a piece of meat inside it. The robbers had stolen the skull from a grave and the meat was a meal for a Tokoloshe they believed was protecting them.

Caffery clicked on the next slide and the screen filled with a crude drawing of a dwarf-like creature with a lolling tongue, proudly holding its cock up to the viewer. Reading the caption, his chair pulled close to the screen, the sun coming through the slits in the blind and heating his face, coldness crept through Caffery: 'The Tokoloshe's penis is a symbol of his danger and masculinity. Women put their beds on bricks to keep out of his reach. Traditionally a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank.'

. . . a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank
. Caffery read it again, his head thumping. He was thinking about the waitress at the Station – about the kid she'd seen exposing himself. And then, inexplicably, he thought about a wisp of shadow in an alleyway, the red of Keelie's lipstick, the sense that a foot had walked across the bonnet of the car. He got to his feet, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. On screen, the Tokoloshe grinned back at him.

'Fuck off,' he muttered, hitting the button on the monitor rather than closing the file. 'Fuck you.'

It was time to go back and see Rochelle. Time to ask her a few more questions.

She was pleased to see him. He could see that right off. In a pink zip-up hooded top, her hair held off her face by a white headband, she looked as if she might have been getting ready for a workout in spite of the full make-up. She put her hands behind her back and leaned her bottom against the wall so her breasts were pushed towards him. 'Hello,' she said. 'Changed your mind about the beer?'

'Can I come in?'

She inclined her head and stood back to let him pass. He went through the kitchen into the living room. The two girls were watching
America's
Next Top Model
. They were in exactly the same position as they'd been yesterday. If it wasn't for the fact they'd changed their clothes he'd have thought they'd been there all night. He stepped over their legs and went into the conservatory at the back.

'Can I get you a drink?' said Rochelle, coming in behind him, bending to plump up the cushions. 'I've got a smoothie-maker. Me and the girls had strawberry and peach this morning.'

'That's OK. Just had some coffee.' He reached inside his folder, feeling for the plastic wallet he'd brought. The Dobermann was on the floor in the sun, eyeing at him with vague interest. 'I won't be long.' He found the picture. It had been taken at a Chamber of Commerce event and it showed Mabuza clutching a glass of red wine, talking intently to a councillor. He was wearing a suit and a traditional
mokorotlo
hat over his greying hair. Caffery slid it out of the wallet and held it out to her. 'This guy. Ever seen him before?'

Rochelle glanced at the photograph, then back at Caffery's face. 'Yeah – it's Gift, Kwanele's mate.'

Caffery closed his eyes briefly.

'What?' said Rochelle. 'What've I said?'

'Nothing,' he said, putting the photo back into his jacket. What a fucking idiot he'd been not to ask her yesterday. He put down the folder and sat on the sofa, looking around the room, at the knick-knacks, the little vases and the framed photos of the kids. There was a picture of a cat – a kitten, actually – washing its face in a splash of sunshine.

'Rochelle,' he said, 'do you remember you told me Kwanele was scared of a devil?'

'A devil? Ain't likely to effing forget, am I? The Tokoloshe. Spent his whole time thinking about the bloody thing.'

'Yes,' he said, watching her face. 'The Tokoloshe. And what did he tell you about it?'

'Well, that's just it. He never told me about it exactly. It was Teesh he used to talk to.' She called into the living room, 'Hey, Letitia?'

'Wha'?'

'Come in here a second, beautiful.'

There was a pause, then one of the girls appeared sullenly in the doorway, chin down.

'Wha'?'

'Say hello to Mr Caffery.'

' 'Lo,' she said.

'Sometimes I think they liked Kwanele more than I did. Didn't you, Teesh, beautiful? Liked Kwanele?'

'Yeah. Suppose.'

'Bought you a Wii, didn't he?'

'Yeah. He was cool.'

'Now, baby,' Rochelle said. 'Remember the Tokoloshe? I want you to tell Mr Caffery about it.'

Letitia peered over her shoulder at the skirting-board behind her – as if that was what really interested her and not Caffery. 'Really short. Lives in the river. Looks black.'

'Speak up.'

'I
said
. I said it's short. It's black. It's deformed. It lives in a river and it's always naked, OK?'

'Letitia,' Caffery said slowly, 'how do you know about it? Did Kwanele talk to you about it?'

'Yea-ah.' She made the one word go up and down so it sounded like a sentence:
Yes, my God,
didn't you know that? Where've you been all your
life, you muppet?
'He only talked about it like all the time.'

'What did he tell you?'

'Just lo-
oads
. It eats people. I seen it once too.'

'Teesh,' Rochelle said warningly, 'Mr Caffery's a policeman. You tell the truth now. Not what Kwanele told you to say.'

Letitia looked at her mother, then at Caffery. 'I did see it,' she said. 'It was like totally weird. Mum just doesn't never believe nothink I ever say.'

'Oh, here we go again.'

Caffery held up his hand to pacify them. 'Letitia, where did you see it?'

'Down by the river. Where Kwanele's warehouse used to be.'

'And did anyone else see it?'

'Just him and me. It was night. He took me there to do some – what d'you call it, Mum?'

'Stocktaking.'

'Stocktaking. And it was late and when we was coming out of the warehouse there's this sound in the bushes, like a bird or something, and there's this thing sort of half bent over. And water running off it. Which makes us both think it was coming out of the river.'

'OK,' Caffery said, his head full of the dwarf in Marilyn's slide presentation, of the pontoon outside the Moat late at night. 'So you're saying Kwanele saw it too?'

'Yeah – and he's like
so
scared. He starts going like this.' She put a hand on her chest and breathed in and out rapidly, hyperventilating. It was creepy, Caffery thought, sitting in the sunlight and watching this little girl acting it out. 'And then he puts his hand over my eyes and makes me get in the car, and he jumps in after me. And we was coming home and he keeps shaking and crying, and speaking African, and saying how he was going to do something about it. I mean, how scary is that?'