Ritual (4 page)

She tried not to think about it, working in the soupy water. They'd chosen a jackstay search pattern, pinning a shot line at each side of the harbour because it was narrow enough at this point, then stringing a diagonal line between the two and moving along it, sweeping with a free hand. She'd been working the pattern for almost forty minutes – too long, really. Not that she cared, but it was dark surface-side, she could tell that from the colour of the water, and Dundas should have pulled her out by now. She wasn't going to undermine the authority she'd given him, but she was tired now of swimming to and fro, moving the jackstay weight a metre along the harbour wall, then turning, keeping the line on her left as she sculled her way back, working slowly, hugging the bottom, dredging with her hands in a one-metre arc.

A defensive tactile search it was called, tactile because you did everything by touch, and defensive because you expected any minute to find something hazardous – broken glass, fishing line. Sometimes the last thing you expected to find was what you were looking for. A foot. Or hair. Once, the first contact she'd had with a corpse had been its nostrils – both fingers up them. You couldn't have managed that if you'd tried, said Dundas. Another time she'd dragged a piece of industrial-pipe lagging to the surface, sweating and swearing, one hundred per cent certain it was the leg of a thirty-year-old gym instructor who'd gone off Clifton Bridge a week earlier. Everything got upside down when you were weighted to neutral buoyancy and could see only a few inches in front of you. When she hit the shotline under the pontoon, only two metres from where she'd found the hand, it was a weird relief.

Moving slowly because she was starting to tire now, she hauled the weight out of the mud, moved it along a metre and dropped it again. She had made it secure and was checking the line was tight ready for the return journey when something happened that made goosebumps break out all over her. It was the weirdest thing. She didn't see anything, and afterwards she wouldn't even be able to swear she'd felt anything, but suddenly, for a reason she couldn't explain, she was certain someone else was in the water with her.

She twisted round, ripping out her ankle knife and jamming her back against the wall. Breathing hard she clutched the shotline and, moving her feet a little, steadied herself with the knife out in front of her, ready for something to come hurtling at her.

'Rich?' she said shakily, into the coms mic.

'Yeah?'

'See anyone else in the water?'

'Uh – no. Don't think so. Why?'

'I dunno.' She kept herself upright by sculling her hand a little, stopping the water twisting her back to the wall. The air in her suit tried to rise to the surface, gathering round her neck, pressing on her and making her light-headed. 'Think I've seen a ghost.'

'What's up?'

'Nothing. Nothing,' she said. Her head was thudding now. The shot buoy was meant to take a human's weight and she could haul herself up it in a second if anything came at her. But her training stopped her bolting for the surface and she waited, breathing hard, eyes scanning the gloom, moving the knife in a defensive circle around her. Bristol harbour, she told herself. Only Bristol harbour. And she hadn't actually seen a thing. Minutes ticked by. The needle on her SPG contents gauge moved minutely, and slowly, slowly, when nothing happened and her pulse and breathing began to return to normal, she pushed the knife back into her ankle garter. It was last night and Dad's study catching up with her again. This wasn't funny. Not at all. She steadied herself and tipped down from the waist so the air returned to her legs and she wasn't being squeezed any more round the neck. She let a moment or two pass, the silt swirling round her.

'Dundas?' she said. 'You there?'

'You all right, Sarge?'

'No. No, I'm not.'
I'm having hallucinations,
Rich. Paranoia. The whole works
. 'You've dived me for forty minutes,' she said at last. 'I think it's time to pull me out. Don't you?'

Dad's study had been locked since the accident. Flea had always known where the key was – hanging on the nail in the pantry – it was just that she'd never found the courage to use it. Two years had passed since the accident and still she couldn't bring herself to go into the place Dad used to retreat to think. In the early days after the accident, her brother Thom would go in there to think, to reflect on what had happened, but now he wouldn't come near it, wouldn't even go in and help her sort everything out. Everyone knew how hard Thom had taken their parents' loss, even harder than Flea had, and maybe, when you thought about what had happened to him in the accident, it wasn't a surprise he refused even to say the words:
Mum and Dad
. . .

In the end she'd had to do it alone. It was a sunny Tuesday morning two days before the hand was found in the harbour. The television was on in the kitchen and she was in the pantry searching the back of the shelves for an old flour canister, a blue and white bakeware tin with a sieve in the lid that Mum always used for making sponges. She was stretching forward when something made her look sideways, and there, glinting at her, was the key. She stood for a moment, her arms pushed into the back of the cool darkness, her eyes rolled sideways, looking at it. For a moment it seemed to be communicating something to her – fanciful, she knew. Nevertheless she decided right there and then that it was telling her the time had come.

The house her parents had lived in for thirty years was ramshackle, spreadeagled. Four eighteenth-century stone-workers' dwellings joined together, it rambled along the side of a remote country road for almost sixty feet, a stoneflagged corridor running down its spine. The study was at the end of the corridor, and when she got there she was a little shaky on her feet. She stopped at the door, feeling like Alice in Wonderland with the key lodged in her palm, the other hand resting on the door, her nose pressing against it, breathing in the smoky waxed musk of the wood. Dad never encouraged the children to go in, but she knew what the room on the other side of the door looked like: stone-built, open beams, her father's books covering all three walls from floor to ceiling. There was an old-fashioned librarian's stool he'd push along with his foot – she could see him now, the spectacles he'd mended with Araldite sliding down his nose as he peered at the spines of his books.

With all this in her head that morning she was prepared for what happened when she put the key in the lock and turned it. She was prepared for the way she was picked up by the scruff of her neck and thrown back to her childhood. It was the air: warm and sweat-stained, tinted with turpentine and resin, pipe tobacco and heather coming out of the books, the way Dad'd always smell when he came in from the garden on an autumn day. Inhaling it was like inhaling her father's last breath. Then she saw the librarian's stool against the bottom shelf and the way the battered wing chair was pushed slightly back from the desk as if he'd stood up only a few moments ago, and she leaned into the doorframe, pressing her teeth together until they creaked to stop the tears.

Eventually she pushed herself away from the door and went to the desk, halting briefly as if Dad might be there, saying, 'Not when I'm working, Flea. Go and help your mother.' The sun was coming through the gaps in the shutters, striking the back of the chair, and when she put her hands there the leather was slightly greasy and warm, like the skin of her hands. The old draughts set, its cheap balsa wood pieces painted in scagliola to resemble marble, sat in the centre of the desk where Dad used to play against himself late into the night.

She wasn't methodical by nature – it was how she'd got her nickname, jumping at things – but her training in the job had helped and when she began to search Dad's study she did it as she'd do a forensic retrieval with the unit: systematically, in silence, cross-legged on the floor as the grandfather clock ticked in the hallway outside and the neighbours' horses whickered from the fields. In every corner of the room there were boxes crammed with journals, notes and projector slides, faculty photographs of Dad, owlish in a corduroy jacket; four sealed boxes of books marked with his best friend Kaiser Nduka's name. When she'd finished searching, almost everything she'd found was exactly what she'd have expected of Dad.

Almost everything.

Because among the detritus and dust there were two things she hadn't expected. Two things she couldn't explain.

The first was a small safe. Pushed under the desk so it was hard up against the wall, it was the old-fashioned sort with a brass Yale dial lock. Unopenable. She tried every number sequence she could think of – Mum's birthday, Dad's birthday, her birthday, Thom's, her parents' wedding anniversary. She even got an old mathematical book down from the shelves and leafed her way through integer sequences, trying them at random: the Wythoff Array, the Para-Fibonacci sequence. But the safe wouldn't budge, so in the end she pushed it aside and turned back to the other thing she'd found: a purple brocade jewellery roll of her mother's pushed into the back of the desk drawer.

Inside, there was a ziplock freezer bag, and the second she unwrapped it she knew what it contained – she recognized them from the drugs warrants she'd executed over the years. Mushrooms, wispy shrivelled things huddled together like tiny dry ghosts. There must have been hundreds – enough to give real weight to the jewellery roll. She opened the bag and tipped them out into her skirt. They came with a scattering of small fibres, spreading across the fabric, and as they did a memory lifted into her head.

It was a picture of Dad, lying on his back on the sofa, his hands resting on his chest, a cushion on his face to shut out the light. He'd lie like that for hours on end, not speaking or moving, as if he was sleeping. Except he wasn't sleeping. There was something too unsettled about him for sleep. It was something else. Now, poking the mushrooms, she wondered if she was beginning to understand. So, Dad, she thought, was
this
what it was for you all that time? And I never guessed.

She sat looking at the mushrooms for a long time. Then, when the grandfather clock struck eleven, something big locked into place in the back of her head. She got to her feet and shovelled them back into the ziplock bag, put it into the velvet jewellery roll and got to her feet. Picking up the safe she went to the kitchen, put everything on the shelf, then stood for a few moments at the window, staring out. Her mouth was dry, her head was thudding, because she knew, as sure as she knew the smell of her own father, that she was going to take the mushrooms too.

Now, standing next to the underwater recovery unit's Mercedes van at the head of the slip, the arclights fizzing and popping as the team wandered around, Flea could still feel the sickly psilocybin moving through her system. Even when, at eight, they called a halt because everyone was too knackered and the Health and Safety lot would tap her on the shoulder if they got wind she'd worked the men these hours, even then she found it difficult to turn away from the harbour – from the mesmerizing pull of the water and the eerie sense that something nasty was going to come out of it.

The team had gathered at the van and were coiling the yellow and blue umbilicals, packing up the surface supply panel. DI Caffery stood a few feet away, just inside the shadows, arguing on his mobile: she could hear most of the conversation – he was speaking with the SIO who was already pissed off that he'd taken all this extra dive unit time without waiting for the pathologist to confirm that the hand had been cut off.

She turned away tiredly, a bit irritated. Her team had knocked themselves out. They'd searched the whole of Welshback: under the houseboats, even into the vaulted foundations of the bonded warehouses opposite, finding everything down there from mobile phones, pairs of knickers, tables and chairs from the bars on the front to a decommissioned gun. Four divers had clocked up ninety minutes each; they'd covered a sixty-metre section of the harbour. But, and she knew she was the only one who noticed this, it wasn't enough for DI Caffery. She could tell he was disappointed in her, let down that she couldn't work a miracle when it was her unit who'd set him out on this wild-goose chase. When at last she'd closed the doors of the Mercedes and seen the team on their way, she couldn't help it – she couldn't let him go away thinking she'd failed: she caught up with him as he made his way back to the car.

'Look,' she said, in a voice more apologetic-sounding than she'd meant it to be, 'I suppose there's a chance the rest of the body could have shifted.'

'Yeah?' he said. She had to walk fast to keep up with him, splashing through foul-smelling puddles at the front of the restaurant because he didn't break step. 'Meaning?'

'Uh, meaning there was flow-through here today – they had the sluices open – so I suppose theoretically it could have shifted down into the upper harbour.' As she said it she knew it was bullshit. She'd never in her six years in the unit known a body to do that. It was pretty much physically impossible. 'It's a big jump to make, I grant you, but if you really want to keep at it we could be back here in the morning.'

'Sure,' he said, without even taking time to think about it. He swung into a junky old car, badly parked across the entrance to the restaurant and put the key into the ignition. 'That's good,' he said, through the open window. 'See you at first light, then.'

He started the engine and he was off. No goodbye, just a quick swerve out into the deserted road. The headlights disappeared and then she was alone on the quayside, except for the two uniforms out of Broadbury patrolling the sealedoff area in the distance. She stood for a moment, in the silence, realizing that her feet were wet and greasy from the puddle, that she was shivering and tired, but most of all realizing how totally pissed off she was. Not so much pissed off with DI Caffery as with herself. A body shifting along the harbour floor? Yeah, right. Christ, what a sap.

The hallucinations the day before had come on like an electrical storm. At first there had been nothing. Not even the elevated pulse she'd expected. Flea had taken the mushrooms at eleven thirty. A full hour had gone by and she was about to get up from her father's sofa and go into the kitchen to make toast, when something made her start. She'd had the impression of a firework exploding outside the window, somewhere in the blue sky high over the spires of Bath.

She sat up and turned to the window, and as she did, she spotted something else, a movement behind her in the shadow: a vague smear of colour, as if something in the study was reaching out a hand for the back of her neck. When she turned there was nothing, only the patches of sunlight dancing on the wall. For a while she sat looking stupidly at it. And then, suddenly, she was laughing. She leaned back, the laughter huge in her mouth, bigger than her tongue, bigger than her throat. And that was how it started.

She couldn't have said when the hallucinations reached their peak, how long into the trip it was, but at one point she knew who she was and where she was and that she'd taken a drug and that things were happening, and the next moment her face was hard against the sofa, and the fabric, so close to her eyes, was magnified a hundred times, the weave like the trunks of trees. She could smell mothballs and see a small dot of white, probably a stray thread in the sofa, but suddenly it was big and she could see it wasn't a thread, it was her mother in the trees, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a floral scarf round her head, squatting down to inspect a patch of dog violet.

Flea's mouth moved against the rough fabric, a word coming out:
'Mum?'
It sounded so far off, her own voice – as if it was coming from a distant hill – but Jill Marley heard it. She turned, looking into the trees questioningly, not quite seeing her daughter. Her expression was unmistakably sad – Flea could tell from the straight set to her mouth, the reflection in her eyes.

'Oh, Mum.' Her throat tightened. She reached up a hand to touch the image. 'Mum? What is it?'

Jill stared into the trees. Then, slowly, cautiously, because still she couldn't see her daughter, she began to speak. Flea knew what she was saying was very important, and she strained forward to listen, but at that moment the image faded and Flea was back where she remembered being before, on the sofa, the fabric against her cheek and nothing left of the hallucination but the notion, so clear it was like the wind or the swell of the sea, that the words Mum had been about to say were: 'You looked in the wrong place. We went the other way.'

We went the other way.

Lying on the sofa, the late sun streaming through the gaps in the shutters on to her red eyelids, she knew, without having to question it, that her mother could only have been talking about one thing.

She was talking about the accident.