Ritual (7 page)

Kaiser's face was grave. 'What did you say?'

'I said, something about the accident – something in the way we're thinking about it – is all wrong. We've been looking in the wrong place.' She held his eyes. 'Kaiser, I'm going to do it – I'm going to take them again. Find out what she meant.'

A long, long silence rolled out between them. Something was happening behind his eyes – she could almost see the computations he was making. Then, when it seemed they'd be locked there for ever, Kaiser broke away, and went back to his chair. He sat for a moment, hands on the armrests, head turned sideways, looking at his ex-fiancée's face. 'If you want to communicate with people who've gone,' he said quietly, 'there is something. A hallucinogen you can control, a drug that is legal. Your father introduced me to it.'

'But you don't believe it, do you? You don't really believe it's all true?'

'There'll be some literature about it in your father's study.' Kaiser pretended not to have heard the question. 'Please, read it, then come back to me. Throw away the baldheads – they won't take you any further. But this will.'

'"This"?' She sat forward, creeped and excited all at once, as if her skin had been brushed the wrong way. 'What's "this", Kaiser?'

'What's "this"?' He smiled to himself, a little sadly, as if it was a secret he'd known he'd have to give up one day – that he had to be big about letting it go. '"This" is called ibogaine.'

'Ibogaine?' She whispered the word. It put pictures in her head of firelight and people dancing ancient dances in the dark.

'Ibogaine,' Kaiser said. 'And if you really want to speak to your mother again . . .'

'Yes?'

'. . . then it's the only route to take.'

The morning of the second day of the case, drinking coffee on Bristol harbour and watching the dive team assemble their kit, Jack Caffery was thinking about a direction: he was thinking about west. For a long time it wasn't going to be west for him when he left London, it was going to be east – the direction that for an Englishman means cold winds and invaders. At about the same time that his sense of a connection with Ewan had disappeared he'd been doing a job in Norfolk, and maybe that was why he'd felt pieces of him had got stuck there. For a while after the abrupt ending of his sense of Ewan, he'd looked for a position in East Anglia, monitoring vacancies on the web. But when months had gone by with none coming up, he'd turned his attention to the west where something more interesting was happening.

A prisoner had been released from an open jail.

A man who understood a particular species of violence. The more Caffery thought about it, the more he knew he needed to meet him. Then, almost like an omen, a position came up in the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. The wait for Norfolk was shelved and it was west that Caffery came: to smugglers and apple orchards and Somerset, the land of the summer people.

It was odd how things had worked out because there was something about working in the west he liked: a straightforwardness instead of the freakiness of London where, whatever you did, it all ended up a bit warped. Now, as the sun sparkled off the boats and the restaurant windows and the courting swans in the harbour making heart shapes with their necks, he told himself he was liking the west. Yes, he thought, looking down to where the dive unit had finished loading the boat and Flea was standing in its bow zipping up her dry suit, if it wasn't for some promises he'd made himself, if it wasn't for the bad way he felt inside about women, he could get to like this place.

She was only a couple of feet below him, her hair pinned up wildly round her small tanned face, her feet planted wide to balance as the boat rocked. Now that he looked at her closely he saw her pause, her hand at her collarbone. She wasn't facing the harbour, the part they were going to dive this morning, but the opposite direction, back towards the quay – at the point where the pontoon met the wall a few feet beneath his feet. It was the exact place the waitress had pointed to when she'd described seeing the odd creature coming out of the water.

It was a moment or two before anyone noticed her expression, then PC Dundas, who was about to throttle up the motor, glanced at her and saw that something was wrong. He let go of the tiller. 'Sarge?'

'Yeah – hang on.' She held up a hand. 'Hang on.'

She was staring at the harbour wall, as if she was trying hard to remember something important – something just out of reach. Caffery remembered a snatch of tourist blurb he'd read: the harbour and the Cut had been built by prisoners of the Napoleonic wars and still stood, almost two hundred years later, mossed, slimed and blackened from decades of engine oil and pollution. To him they were unfamiliar and weird, like a dungeon, but Flea must know them back to front so her sudden interest made no sense.

'Sarge?' Dundas said, frowning. 'Sarge? You all right?'

She didn't turn to him. Instead she raised her head to Caffery. 'It was raining yesterday morning,' she said. 'Wasn't it?'

He gathered himself quickly – a bit unprepared for the direct way she was looking at him. He put his elbow on the handrail and leaned over. 'Yeah. Yeah, it was. Why?'

She stared at him a bit more, sort of blankly, as if she was still trying to work an idea out of an awkward corner of her head. Then, a passing boat sent up a swell that rocked the little launch and her concentration was gone. She shook her head and finished zipping the dry suit. She pulled on her harness, then her fins. 'Come on,' she called, signalling Dundas to start the engine. 'Let's do it.'

Caffery watched the boat set off, leaving a foamy trail in the muddy water. Flea was bending over, checking her cylinders, tapping gauges, clipping the lifeline to the harness with a D-ring. He was in a way glad to see her go – she had a way of looking at him as if she knew all his secrets, not just the ordinary ones but the dirty ones too. As if she knew where he'd gone after he left the harbour last night. Now he couldn't tell if the bad taste in his mouth was from the bottle of wine he'd drunk or the memory of what he'd done in the back of his car, parked in the alley next to the dumpsters.

He watched till the boat had gone round the corner, then finished his coffee – the third cup, because whatever happened he couldn't allow a hangover into his day. The fingerprints on the hand hadn't come back. The IDENT1 computer wasn't as bad as the old NAFIS system but it could be slow and overnight it had only pulled up one of the five prints needed for comparison. But the path report was complete and made disturbing reading. The pathologist had recovered some fibres from the hand, purply-blue ones that she'd sent to the lab at HQ, and she'd agreed that the marks on the bones had been made by a saw. She also said that the hand had probably been removed when the victim had still been alive.

All of which had brought the superintendent down a bit on his fury with Caffery. He'd assigned a level to the case and the Major Crime Investigation Unit had sent a staffing quota of a three-man HOLMES team for the incident room at Kingswood, two more DCs, a DS and a civvy investigator – a retired officer – plus a crime-scene manager and a scene liaison officer. It lit Caffery up to have decent manpower – there were another four men due at the quayside by eight a.m., ready to start interviewing anyone who worked in or frequented the area. Today the harbour would be running with police.

He crumpled the coffee cup and was about to head back to the road to meet his team when the sound of the utility craft made him stop. It was heading back towards the pontoon fast, Flea in the bows wearing her dive hood, no mask, staring at the same part of the harbour wall she'd been pulled by five minutes ago. As the boat came nearer and Dundas killed the engine, the stern came round so it lay alongside the wall. She leaned forward and, grabbing the buddleia trunks that grew out of the mossy quayside wall, dragged the boat sideways, stopping every few inches to press her hands against the stone, inspecting it with a frown.

'What's up?' Caffery peered at her head – shiny and dark like that of a small seal. 'Found something?'

'Nope. I've worked something out.'

'What?'

'The witness statement,' she said, breathing hard now. 'Did you read it?'

'Only in outline. They took it at New Bridewell. Why?'

'I got most of it from your super in the briefing. Right from the beginning it bothered me.' She squinted down at the harbour wall. She brushed aside some algae, squinted again and shook her head, dismissing whatever had caught her attention. 'It bothered me that he could see the hand at all. Bothered all of us.'

She stepped her hands further along the wall, digging her nails in. Caffery took a few steps along to keep up with her. 'And it still bothers you?'

'It was nil vis in the water yesterday. I just couldn't square it – how he could have seen the bloody thing.'

Something caught her eye and she stopped again. She swung her legs round so she was sitting on the stern of the boat, fingers digging into one of the mossed old stones of the quayside, her feet wedged against the pontoon so she could push the craft into the wall and get her face close to it. Dundas had found a mooring pin and was holding on to it, steadying the boat. She made a small, satisfied noise and pushed her right hand at the wall. Caffery leaned over as far as he could but all he could see was her head, her shoulders, her face, turned sideways and screwed up in concentration, and her arm disappearing deep into the wall.

'I said, is it bothering you now?'

She nodded. Her eyes had the shortened focus of someone who is working by feel alone. 'Yes. And he said there wasn't . . .' She pushed her arm a little further in. 'He said there wasn't anyone else on the quayside. Didn't he?'

'Far as I know. Maybe it was floating.'

She glanced up at him. Blue eyes that gave him a jolt because he hadn't noticed before that there was something a bit wild about them. Then she dropped them again and all he could see was the top of her dive hood, and her arm burrowing into the wall.

'A hand on its own doesn't float,' she said. 'It just wouldn't. Even if it had started to decompose . . .'

She broke off. She pulled her arm out of the hole and looked at what she held in her fist. A lump of congealed black slime with pieces of leaf and stick in it. She rolled backwards a little and dropped the mess on to the pontoon, giving it a cursory examination with a finger, her face tight with the strain of holding herself up.

Then she glanced back at Caffery – that flash of blue light in her eyes again. 'Even if it's decomposed, which this one wasn't, a hand still wouldn't
float
.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's too heavy, so much bone, not much soft tissue. And even if there was enough gas the skin's broken, so the gases would've escaped. No gases, no floating.' She inserted her hand back into whatever hole she'd found. He could smell it – the foul odour of drains and dark places. This time her arm went in all the way up to the shoulder. Her face was pressed against the wall, squashing her cheek forward. 'Which means he's either lying. Or . . .'

'Yes?'

'Or it got washed into the water by a current and he happened to see it going down. It was raining yesterday morning. So, for example, it could have come out of a storm drain.' She grimaced as she tried to get a grip on something. With a little grunt she wedged her free hand against the wall and levered herself backwards, pulling her right hand out and delivering the second wet handful of slime on to the pontoon. Then she pulled back, both hands either side of the hole and peered into it. The sleeves of her dry suit were covered with green moss and slime. 'A storm drain. Like this one.'

It takes some time – and some getting desperate on Mossy's part – but in the end he decides they're not asking much of him.

The deal goes like this: they'll take some blood, bleed him a little. It's not the same as 'red' – they won't fuck him until he bleeds – they're going to use a needle instead. Skinny's got the equipment ready, a syringe and a tube leading to something that looks like a catheter bag. They're going to take it from one of the veins that isn't burned out, fill the bag, it'll take twenty minutes maybe, then he can have a lie-down, another hit, a cup of tea or a Tennants Extra if he wants. Anyway, he's free to go. There'll be two hundred nicker in it and the whole bag of gear Skinny's been flashing around. He's got to go back out of the building in the blindfold and they'll drop him anywhere in Bristol he wants to go. And what keeps going through his head is why wouldn't he trust them? People give their blood for free, don't they? And what's the deal? Selling a little piece of himself that he doesn't need and, fuck's sake, it's not like he hasn't been selling his hole for long enough. Think of this as a variation on a theme, even if it is a bit off its head. Anyway, it's so warm in here, and there's a smell somewhere of food cooking and suddenly he remembers he hasn't eaten since last night.

He lies on the couch and smokes a thin little J while Skinny gets the needle in. It takes two tries and when he checks the blood's coming up he botches it, pulls too quick making Mossy swear.

'You're an expert,' goes Mossy, watching him stick it down with Sellotape and attach a tube to it. 'Ain't you?'

There's a little plastic tap on the tube and Skinny's about to turn it when it's as if something occurs to him. He pauses and looks over his shoulder into the darkness, just long enough for Mossy to wonder if someone's watching them. He lifts his head off the sofa a little and tries to peer into the gloom where Skinny's looking. There's another of those gates there, locked, and beyond it a room in darkness.

Skinny makes a little sound in the back of his throat. He lets go of the tube and, moving daintily, like a girl dancer, he lies on the sofa next to Mossy, his hand draped over Mossy's bony ribcage. Surprised, Mossy lifts his chin and squints down at the top of Skinny's head, at the curls and snags and bits of fluff tangled there, and feels an unexpected tenderness. It's like this guy is trying to comfort him, or warm him. It feels like the way a kid curls up with a parent.

'What?' he says, and his voice comes out a little hoarse because all of a sudden he wants to touch Skinny's hair. 'What do you want?'

'I'm sorry. Plenty sorry.'

'What you talking about?'

He feels Skinny swallow. He can actually feel the cartilage in the man's throat move up and down against his arm.

'Them's wanting you to scream.'

Mossy can feel the thick beat of the hash going through his veins and, for a moment, he thinks he's going to laugh. 'Scream?' he goes, half smiling. 'You fucking joking? Why've I got to scream?'

'It's all I ask you. When I pull out your blood you scream. OK?'

Mossy cranes his neck, trying to see into the adjoining room, looking for a pair of eyes in the dark, trying to catch out whoever's watching. He can't see anything, only the glint of the metal gate, which he's one hundred per cent is locked. He laughs, deep and knowing. Now he gets it.

'Hey, sweetheart,' he calls, his voice echoing into the dark spaces. 'I know you're out there. Can't see you, like, but I know you're there. And let me just tell you – I
like
perverts. I do. I love you all. I'll do the best show you've ever seen. Got your video running, have you?'

As if in answer, from out of the darkness comes a click and a whirr and a red light blinks on and off. Mossy puts his head back and laughs. He's on home ground now. He's been videoed by them all – the ones who want to watch themselves and the ones who are so ashamed, either because of what they're doing or because they know their dick size will humiliate them, that they have to video him and get off later when he's gone and can't laugh. Now he gets why the price is so good, and it's something he doesn't care about. He can relax.

Skinny shifts. He sits up and turns on the tap. His face is close, and Mossy wonders if they could be friends. 'Scream,' whispers Skinny. 'Now. Scream.'

And Mossy does. He drops his head back on the scratchy sofa and screams.