Ritual (37 page)

She wrenched her Quikcuffs out of the body armour's front pocket and threw herself down next to the men, trying to push the ASP between them, but she couldn't get at Tig's hands.

'Flip him,' she yelled at Caffery. 'Flip the bastard – let me get the cuffs on.'

'He's trying to fuck me first,' Tig hissed. 'Wants to give me one before you cart me away.'

Caffery gritted his teeth and used his elbows to lever Tig's hands down. Flea reached out to grab his legs but he yanked them away, drumming his feet on the floor. 'Did you hear me?' he screamed at Caffery, saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth. His bad eye was flicking from side to side. 'I said, do you want to give me a little hand-job while we're down here, you City Road whore-fucker?'

On top of him Caffery went still. Sweat ran down from his forehead into his eye, but he didn't blink or move.

'Let me get at his arms,' Flea shouted, trying to find a good place on Tig's arm to bring the ASP down. 'Let me get at him!'

'Hey,
filth
, answer me,' Tig roared up into his face. 'Yes,
you
, you fucking filth john.' He thrust up at him with his hips. '
Answer
me. Come on! Say you want it.'

Time seemed to stop. Then, in an instant, it accelerated forward with a jolt. Somewhere behind her, Flea could hear voices, a radio cackling, someone in a far-away room yelling, 'POLICE', and Caffery rocked back, grabbed Tig's ears, pulling his head up. Tig screamed, trying to wrench himself free. Flea had to change sides, stepping over them, banging her legs on the bath, trying desperately to reach under and get Tig's arm, but this time it was Caffery who was stopping her. Without a sound, not a sigh or a word, he released Tig's ears, letting his head crack down on to the tiled floor.

'Jesus!' she yelled. 'Stop it! You'll—'

But Caffery wasn't listening. He hauled Tig's head back again, and slammed it down, harder this time. Something shot out across the floor – a tooth, maybe. Blood pumped from Tig's nose in a thin fountain, the width of a straw. '
I will fucking
kill you
.' Caffery knelt back to adjust his grip on Tig's ears. He was going to do it again.

'Stop it.
Stop it!
' She grappled at him, digging her fingers in, trying to get him to loosen his grip, but he shouldered her away, scuffling on the floor so his back was to her. Under him Tig's feet were kicking for purchase. She rolled back, got on to her haunches, not enough time to get the position right, just enough to choose a target – not the ribs, because of the body armour, but his ankle. That would do: his ankle. His feet in the smart Loakes shoes and grey socks, trousers snagged up enough to show a bit of dark hair on his shins. She muttered a prayer and brought the ASP down fast, just once, on the bone.

There was a split second's silence – absolute quiet. Caffery went very still, his head held back. For a moment she thought he wouldn't move, thought he'd snarl at her, but instead, with a long exhalation, he loosened his grip on Tig and rolled away in a foetal curl, clutching his ankle. She expected him to scream at her, but he didn't, just lay on his side with his back to her, holding his foot, his ribs rising and falling, rising and falling under the body armour.

She had two or three seconds of surreal silence, just long enough to study the back of his neck, to look at Tig with blood over his chest, curled up, his hands clamped to his face. Then there were shouts, and flashlights, and radios. The Support Unit guys were swarming over the place, and the whole thing, the whole bloody thing, was over.

Caffery was peeing when it happened. He was standing in the trees, steam coming off his urine because it had got cold now the sun was going down, when the noise came from his left, slightly down the slope, making him stop. At first he thought it was the Walking Man, picking up sticks for the fire, but when he glanced behind him through the branches he could see that the Walking Man was where he'd been earlier, silhouetted against the twilight sky.

He shook himself, zipped up and, hand in his coat pocket to check that his penknife was still there, limped a short way into the trees. He stood for a moment, trying to disentangle the shadows, make sense of them. On the distant road the traffic droned, low and steady, but in the trees there was no noise. After a while he went back to the camp.

The Walking Man was standing next to the unlit fire, eyes bright in the new moonlight, staring in the direction of the noise. 'Jack Caffery, Policeman,' he said, not taking his eyes off the trees. 'What have you brought with you to my fireside?'

Caffery didn't answer. There had been no cars on the track that led into the wood, no noises. Whoever it was must have come on foot. The Walking Man clicked on his lighter. He bent and put a flame to the fire, which flared and sprang instantly to life, bathing the area with red light, throwing the branches and brambles into stark relief. Then he pocketed the lighter and went to the edge of the trees. There was a long, long silence while he seemed to be listening to the night. Then, as if he was satisfied, he grunted and shook his head.

'It's gone now.'

Caffery was still studying the edge of the firelight, the edge of the night.

'Don't worry,' the Walking Man said. 'It's just curious. At the moment, just curious. It's still scared of you.'

' "It"? And what the fuck is "it"?'

'Who knows?' The Walking Man smiled. 'A devil? A witch?'

'Fuck off.'

The Walking Man gave a nasty laugh. 'Yeah – of course, you're right. It's none of those things. It's a figment of your imagination.'

Caffery looked past the Walking Man at the trees. He couldn't say why but suddenly all he could think about was the little black guy at Tig's. It had turned out he was an illegal immigrant, one of the many who hadn't been sharp enough to claim asylum. Like a lot of illegals in the Hopewell area, he'd fallen in with Tig, whose head had started ticking when he'd heard the Tanzanian police were after the skinny little African for trafficking human skins. It didn't take Tig long to see the mileage there: selling
muti
to other Africans in the city, selling the ritual, selling the goods. There was money, big money, in a scam like that.

Earlier in the afternoon, while Tig raged and bellowed like a caged minotaur from a custody-suite cell, Caffery had stood quietly at the skinny guy's door, watching him through the observation hatch, trying to picture him standing naked at a lakeside. It had been him at the harbour, he'd sworn it had been him, wearing the ridiculous dildo thing to scare the women. He'd told them about the grease he'd rubbed over his body, about the way he poured water over himself to make it seem he'd come out of the river. It all tied up, in its way. And yet Caffery couldn't shake the lingering feeling that something was wrong – that he'd missed something. It wasn't the Tig side of things – they fitted perfectly, he'd be in the can for the rest of his life – no, it was something about the skinny guy, the notion of him creeping around the streets when it got dark. Still, Caffery knew he should drop it. The guy was in custody and he should stop thinking about it.

'That's right,' said the Walking Man calmly, reading his mind. 'Stop thinking about it. No one comes near our fire without me knowing.' Caffery watched him walk slowly back to the camp, bending to pull two cans from under his bedroll. He used his Swiss Army knife to puncture the lids, then pushed them into the heart of the fire, jostling them with a stick until they were upright.

Caffery came and sat on one of the squares of foam and tried not to look at the trees. But it wasn't easy. While the food heated, while the Walking Man drank cider and counted the crocus bulbs in the paper bag over and over again, he kept thinking about it. He'd come here with a sleeping-bag, planning to spend the night under the stars, but it was colder than he'd thought and the inhospitable little cottage near the Neolithic circles suddenly seemed like a pleasant place to be. It was only after they'd eaten and he'd drunk half of the jar of scrumpy that his pulse returned to normal. The fire flickered on in the night, and eventually the sounds became more familiar, the shadows staying where they were meant to stay.

When they'd cleared up they went to their sleeping-bags. Caffery pulled his round his shoulders and settled down with his back to the old watering trough, his injured ankle straight out in front of him. The Walking Man pulled his round his knees and sat at the base of a tree.

'Well, now,' he said, opening his jar of scrumpy. The cork made a sharp popping noise that echoed round the camp. 'Mr Policeman has seen a lot today. I know that from his face. Please tell me your stories. I love to hear about death and destruction.'

Caffery grunted. 'There are no stories.' He thought about Tig, never changing since he'd half killed that old lady, never letting the violence go. He thought of himself, of how convinced he'd been that he'd never lose control as he had years ago. He thought of what would have happened if Flea hadn't been in that bathroom today. And then he thought about Penderecki, the person he was really hitting, over and over again. 'Except I've worked out you're right.'

'That I'm right?' He raised his eyebrows. 'I can hardly believe it.'

'You said once you'd never believe in redemption and now I see you're right. There is no such thing.'

The Walking Man laughed. He settled back against the tree-trunk, hands behind his head, and watched him, waiting for him to go on. Caffery knew he was enjoying seeing him discover truths that he, the Walking Man, had known for years. He reached inside his pocket and began to roll a cigarette.

'So if there's no redemption what's left to us? Revenge? Revenge and then death?' He put the cigarette into his mouth and lit it. He met the Walking Man's eyes. His face, he thought, wasn't very lined. So why did he always seem so old? 'I asked you before and you didn't answer. What did you mean when you said I was looking for death?'

The Walking Man snapped a pick from his Swiss Army knife and began to clean his teeth carefully. 'You have two children in your life, Jack Caffery, the one that is dead and the one that doesn't yet exist. The child that could be.'

'Yeah,' Caffery laughed. 'What crap.'

'You had a woman in London, you told me, who wanted a child but you walked away. So you have to ask yourself, is that the last chance you had?'

Caffery sighed. He rubbed his sore ankle, bruised by Flea and her ASP, and looked out at the valley, to a line of poplars on the horizon. He had a sudden picture in his head of a woman. She had fair hair and was wearing jeans, but he couldn't see her face. She had her back to him and was gazing into a pool of water, hardly moving. He wanted to make her turn round. He wanted to know if she was Flea. But whatever he did she wouldn't move.

'No,' he said. 'There won't be any children.' He took a long drag on his cigarette. 'You?'

The Walking Man chuckled. 'Look at me. I could father a child but could you imagine anyone mothering it? It's different for you. Maybe you still have a chance.' He found something on the toothpick and wiped it on the grass. Then he buried the pick in his mouth again. 'When I said you're looking for death I meant that you've chosen to follow the child that's gone. Every step you take in your job, every move, is you making gifts to him – to Ewan. Every case you solve is just something else to lay at his altar. And so you have chosen death. On this course it will not be a painful thing, your death.'

'What does that mean?'

The Walking Man didn't take his eyes off him. His voice was very quiet when he spoke, but every consonant and vowel came lightly through the clean air. 'It means . . .' he whispered. His eyes reflected the firelight. For a moment he looked all things at once: he looked monstrous, he looked sad. He looked old and he looked wise. 'It means that it's not too late. It's not too late for you. You can change your mind. You can still care about a different child. You,' his eyes locked on Caffery's – inescapable, an inescapable truth, 'you, Jack Caffery Policeman, can still care. You can care about the child that might be.'

It was dark when she got home, and the clouds moving across the moon were sending predatory shadows to patrol up and down the hill, slipping across it like wraiths. Exhausted and hungry, Flea parked her car with its back to the valley so she didn't have to look at them. Her PPE body armour and the jeans she'd been wearing had been taken by the CSI team: they'd loaned her a police sweatshirt and combats and there wasn't much left in her car except a set of overalls. She shoved them into the holdall and was getting out of the car when she noticed a wavering square of artificial light on the gravel.

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at the towering face of the Oscars' house just in time to see a light go out, leaving the windows blank, reflecting the gathering night. Dark now, but she thought she saw the movement of a curtain at one. Just a faint shifting of form and colour. Earlier, when the team had been bringing Tig out of the flat, strapped into emergency restraint belts – in spite of Caffery he was alive – she'd noticed one member of the unit standing on the scrappy little piece of grass outside the flat, staring up at the windows in the tower blocks. When she'd asked what he was looking at he'd shrugged, given a little shudder and said something like, 'I dunno. I feel like I'm being watched. It's the windows.'

At the time, her first thought had been of the boarded-up window outside the bathroom – the way the corrugated iron had been torn up just enough to allow someone small to crawl through. Stupid to think it, because everyone who'd been in the flat was in custody now, but it came back to her, that window, and the words:
I feel like I'm
being watched
.

Another movement of light from the Oscars' – someone stepping back from the window, maybe. She had an impulse to walk round to their front door and hammer on it – demand to see Katherine, demand to know when she was going to stop spying. But she didn't. Instead she took a few calming breaths and, with all the control she could muster, raised her hand, acknowledging them, letting them know she knew and that it wasn't going to get to her. Then, she calmly pulled the holdall out and closed the door.

The electronic key fob must have broken; it wouldn't open the boot, so instead of slinging her kit in there overnight, she let herself into the house and dropped it inside the front door. As she straightened she saw a light on in the kitchen at the end of the corridor. There was a smell too, of cooking, of ginger and citrus and molasses. She knew who it was – there was only one person who knew where the spare key was kept, wedged in the branches of the wisteria. Kaiser.

She should ignore him, go upstairs, get warm, get washed. Instead, pulling the police sweatshirt down over her cold hands, she came down to the kitchen. Kaiser was standing at the table, using his fingers to lever muffins in paper cases into a tin.

'Hello,' he said, not looking up at her. 'I've left the molasses tin out on the side to remind you to get some more.'

'Why are you here?'

'Oh,' he said lightly. 'Because you want to talk to me. There are things you still haven't talked about.'

She sighed and sat down at the table, next to the window, her hands tucked in her armpits. She watched him work. He was so familiar to her, so familiar and yet so unfamiliar. He was still wearing the stained white shirt from earlier, and although he kept his enormous African goat face turned from her, she could tell he'd been crying. She noticed Dad's safe from the study was on the table next to the tin. Kaiser must have taken it off the shelf and put it there. She reached over and touched it.

'Kaiser?' she said. 'It's got something to do with Nigeria, hasn't it? Whatever's in here is something to do with the experiments.'

Kaiser stopped what he was doing and looked across at her. 'It was my project, Phoebe. David was simply an observer. Don't blame him too much. He saw nothing in what we did to be ashamed of, but when I was thrown out of the university he knew he had to hide his involvement. I am sorry we didn't tell you, but it was long before you were born and we never thought you needed to know.' He put the last of the muffins away and leaned on the lid to close the tin. 'The safe contains his notes. I don't know the combination, but now he can't speak for himself I think he deserves his privacy, don't you?'

He turned, took the baking tray to the sink and ran the tap. She took her hands out from her armpits and rubbed her tired eyes, looking out of the window to where the moon hung low in the sky beyond Bath, the clouds cruising past it lit grey and yellow like bruises. The nightmare that had started with the hand in the harbour was over. She could put it to bed, everything that had happened: Jack Caffery on the bathroom floor with a light in his eyes that shouldn't be in any police officer's eyes, and Jonah, his neck leaking, his dead eyes on hers as she tried in vain to start his blood-parched heart. Tig was in custody and it was over, the whole thing was over. She should feel a weight lifting. But she didn't. Instead she felt heavier.

'Kaiser,' she murmured, not taking her eyes off the valley. 'When you say ibogaine can let you talk to the dead, do you really believe that?'

He scrubbed at the tray. 'What about you, Phoebe? Do you really believe it?'

'I saw Mum. I didn't tell you but I saw her that night. She told me two things: she said she and Dad were going to be found – soon. She said when they were found I shouldn't try to bring their bodies up. And Kaiser . . .' She hesitated, her voice smaller, almost inaudible. 'This is the part I can't understand, the part I haven't told you about.
It's happened
. Just like Mum said it would. Someone's found them, Kaiser. Someone's found them in Boesmansgat.'

There was a beat of silence while she wondered if he'd heard her, then he laid the tray down in the sink, wiped his hands on his trousers and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He blew his nose. 'Yes,' he said, his voice muffled. He shovelled the handkerchief back in his pocket and raised his head to look out of the window. 'Oh yes. I know.'

'You
know
?'

'I know. David was my only friend, Phoebe. I've waited two years for them to be found. I check every day.'

'But
I
don't. Not any longer. So how did
I
know, Kaiser? I'm sure I didn't really speak to the dead.' She paused, thinking about it, then added, more faintly, 'Or did I?'

He turned to look at her. 'Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But you knew the bodies had been found because you went on the computer during the ibogaine trip.'

'I'm sorry?'

'You looked at the site. I came in from the kitchen and found you at the computer.'

'I got on to divenet?'

'You were crying.'

'But I . . .' She put her fingers on her forehead, frowning, trying to understand how she had forgotten, trying to understand how neatly the ibogaine had excavated her memory.

'I know what you're thinking – that it's impossible. But you don't give the ibogaine enough credit. And you don't give your instincts enough credit either.'

'My instincts?'

'Your need to see your parents again.'

Your need to see your parents again.
The words made her bite her lip. Suddenly, unexpectedly, her throat was tight and there were tears in her eyes. 'Kaiser,' she murmured. 'Oh, Kaiser. I keep thinking we should try to bring them up. Do you think we should try?'

'Only you can answer that. You and Thom. And maybe . . .'

'Maybe . . . ?'

'Maybe your parents. What did your mother say to you in the hallucination?'

'She said to not bring them up. She said whatever happened to leave them there.'

He shook his head, pulled back a chair and sat with his elbows on the table, looking at her steadily. She saw the way the skin crinkled around his eyes and was reminded that he was old. As old and as mysterious as the continent he came from. 'Then don't you think you should listen to her? Let them rest? Let David's past rest, let their bodies rest?' He paused. 'And, Phoebe, more importantly . . .'

'Yes?'

He smiled. He reached over to cover her hand with his. 'Don't you think you should let yourself rest too?'

She pulled her hand away and wiped the tears from her eyes.
Let yourself rest. Let yourself rest
. The words rolled through her head. She turned her eyes to the window. Yes, there was pain – things from her past she didn't want to face. Yes, there were things in the future that would make her cry, probably.

In the distance some lonely wayfarer on the other side of the valley, where the Warminster road ran, must have lit a fire because she saw a small light flare red inside a canopy of knotted trees. It was too far away to see exactly, but she focused on it, and slowly, slowly, something about the light, something about Kaiser's words, began to settle inside her. She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair.

'What are you thinking?' Kaiser asked. 'What's that smile for?'

She didn't answer. She shook her head and just held on to it: the image of the small flame in the distance, the sound of his words repeated over and over, the beginning of something like peace. She was smiling because she now knew he was right. She could allow it. She could allow herself to rest.

THE END