Ritual jc-3 Read online

  'Flea?'

  She stopped, pocketing the phone as if she'd been caught holding a bomb. 'Yes?'

  'I'm new here. New to the area.'

  'I know that.'

  'I'm hoping someone could give me some pointers. To Bristol. You know.' And then, quickly, because it sounded as if he was asking for a date, he said, 'I want a nursery. Just wondering if you could tell me where to look for a good nursery.'

  He wasn't sure but he thought her eyes flickered towards his hand, his ring finger. 'I could ask around,' she said. 'How old's your… son? Daughter?'

  He smiled. Half at the absurdity of the mistake, and half because he felt stupid because he couldn't claim children when everyone else at his age could. 'No,' he said slowly. 'I didn't mean that. I meant plants. I want to buy some plants. Some bulbs. That's all.'

  It was Tig she'd been texting. With this itch in her head about the picture in Kaiser's book, with the way that whatever she did she couldn't get away from the thought of those hands under the restaurant, she'd spent most of the day trying to talk Tig into introducing her to the owner of the Moat. Although at first he'd been appalled, had blustered for a while about professional ethics, 'Mine and yours, Flea, by the way,' in the end he said he'd see, grudgingly, what the owner said, and why didn't she come down to see him at work? Which would have been fine, until what Caffery had just told her about Mallows. Now she was worried.

  If CID were looking at drugs charities, sooner or later Tig would come up on their radar — and what the hell were they going to make of his history, especially if it came out that he knew the owner of the Moat? Plus, if the suits went knocking on his door, no way was he going to believe she hadn't somehow set the ball rolling in his direction. It was going to be two-way nastiness. And if Mallows turned out to be a client of User Friendly, Tig's charity, well, then the shit was really going to hit the proverbial. Still, she thought, swinging into her car and firing off the text — Hi Tig, Be there in an hour — DI Caffery wasn't showing much sign of doing anything about what she'd said. Cryptic though she'd been, he could have shown some interest in the restaurant owner being African. Because, she was absolutely bloody certain, someone ought to be interested.

  She drove quickly to the community centre where Tig took his Wednesday sessions. It was a Victorian schoolhouse, cleaned up and fitted with laminate flooring and disabled toilets with dangling alarm cords. By the time she arrived his group had finished and he was alone in the echoey building. He opened the door to her, wearing a black sweatshirt, camouflage combats tucked into his boots. He was carrying a stack of folders under one arm.

  'Well?' she said, as he led her down the corridor to the little office that smelled of new carpets and cleaning fluid. She went fast, trying to keep up with him. 'Have you spoken to him — your friend? The owner?'

  'I have.' He threw down the folders on the desk and dropped into a swivel chair, his hands linked on his stomach, spinning round to face at her. He gave her the sort of measured smile he'd give an interviewee.

  'OK.' She dumped her holdall and her fleece and shoved her hands into her pockets. 'I'm going to have to beg you.'

  Tig gave a dry laugh. 'He's been away,' he said, 'with his wife in Portugal — they've only been back since lunchtime. We can go for a cup of coffee, but it's not exactly open arms. I'm pretending I want to schmooze some more dosh from him for the charity. So for fuck's sake, girl, don't you be going in there and asking police questions, get it?

  'I get it.'

  'No digging. You sit and keep schtum. Whatever you want to talk about you let him introduce the subject, and if he doesn't introduce it you just walk straight away from it, Flea. Straight away. I'm doing this as a major, major favour, OK? And if it goes tits up, if he gets wind tonight you're filth, then…' He swiped a hand across his throat. 'I'm finished. And it'll be your fault.'

  'God, Tig.' She sat down, folding her arms. 'That'll be me, then, well and truly told, eh?'

  'That's the way it is. And that's the deal. OK?'

  She looked at him for a while, at his hard body and the grey-blue scalp where the hair was shaved. She was thinking about the photo in her bag — the photo of Ian Mallows she'd printed off back at Almondsbury.

  She took a breath and was turning to get the photo from her bag when Tig said suddenly, 'So, tell me, how's the professor? Have you spoken to him again?'

  'Kaiser, you mean? No. Why?'

  'But you're still going there tomorrow?'

  'Yes. In the afternoon.'

  Tig gazed up at the ceiling, as if he was trying to remember something. 'Just remind me — what's his job again?'

  'He's…' Flea paused. 'I don't know — comparative religion. The hallucinations — that's a corner of his job… Why?'

  'Why?' Tig fiddled with the collar of his sweatshirt as if he was too hot. 'Just wonder who you hang out with sometimes. The lowlifes you know.'

  'Lowlifes?'

  'Just wondering if maybe it's time I paid a bit more attention to the men you see.'

  'I don't «see» men, Tig. You know that.'

  'Maybe you don't.' His face was suddenly serious. 'Maybe you don't. But maybe it's still time for me to pay some attention.'

  'What?'

  'I should have done it a long time ago, Flea. I should have always shown more of an interest in you.'

  'Stop it, for Christ's sake. I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'Don't you?' He held her eyes. 'Don't you know?'

  Flea gave a tentative laugh. 'Tig?' she said woodenly. 'You're gay.'

  There was a beat of shocked silence. Then Tig started to laugh. 'Gay?' he said. 'Oh, give me a fucking break. Gay?'

  'Yes, I mean you…' She trailed off, suddenly seeing where this was going. 'Tig,' she said. 'Come on. Tell me you're not serious.'

  'I am,' he said quietly. 'I'm very serious.'

  She blinked. This was insane. Tig was gay. Had always been. Always would be. That was the only way they'd been able to be friends so long. Maybe she wasn't the most perceptive person in the world — she could find a nail in a lake blindfolded, but when it came to other people she was a blunt instrument — but this? This was weird and unbelievable.

  'Well,' Tig said, 'what do you think?'

  'What do I think? I think…' she shook her head '… that if you're saying what I think you're saying, which is pretty weird, to be honest, but if you mean it I've got to say no.'

  'No?'

  'Look, you know what it's been like for me, Tig. I'm just…' She searched for the word. 'I'm cut off. Since the accident I can't think like that. I'm just…' She sighed. Fuck. This was all so bloody clumsy. 'I mean, Tig, for God's sake, you're supposed to be gay.'

  He pushed back his chair and held up his hands, giving a laugh, a sort of 'I knew this would happen and I'm laughing at how good I am at predicting things.' There was tension in his jaw, but his eyes weren't angry. 'Listen. Don't worry about it. I swear — you have a think about it.' His tongue moved around inside his mouth as if an object was in there, or a taste he was trying to push out. 'You think about it and when you're ready you tell me. OK?'

  'OK,' she murmured, still staring, shell-shocked, at his weird offset eyes. 'OK. I will.'

  And then, to cover her discomfort, she turned away, looking for something to do. She picked up her bag and shuffled through it, taking longer than she needed. After a few moments, when her face felt a bit cooler, she closed her fingers over the crumpled photo. For a moment she considered leaving it in her bag. Get the meeting with the restaurant owner over and tell Tig about Ian Mallows another day. But no. It had to be done. There was a world of trouble in it if she didn't. She placed the photo face down next to him on the desk, not meeting Tig's eyes.

  He paused. 'What's this?'

  She took a deep breath. She knew what he was going to say: 'That's one of my clients. Why're you showing me his photo — think I don't see the ugly bastard enough?' She turned the photo over.

  Tig's face went blank. Ther
e was a long, long silence. Then he shrugged. 'What? What am I supposed to be saying? Show me a geezer's photo and what're you waiting for me to say?'

  'You've never seen him before?'

  'No. Am I supposed to have?'

  'He's not one of your clients?'

  'No.'

  She let her breath out and gave a small laugh, feeling a bit better now. 'Thank fuck,' she muttered. 'At least something's going right today.' She zipped the photo back into the holdall and picked up her fleece. And that was when the community centre's doorbell began to echo round the building.

  19

  At the community-centre door in Mangotsfield Caffery was tired. A niggling ache had started in his legs, and while he waited for someone to answer the bell he pushed two ibuprofen into his mouth and dry-swallowed them. He'd have liked a cigarette and to lie down somewhere. Or to be with one of the City Road girls — anywhere except here, waiting to sit through another interview with a reluctant drugs counsellor.

  The meeting at HQ that afternoon had turned into a sterile exercise in man management. Now that drugs were in the equation, the steam had gone out of the inquiry. He'd spent the time gazing at the sprinklers and trimmed lawns of Valley Road HQ, half listening to the SIO and half thinking about those forty names, twenty locations and seventeen counselling services waiting to be visited. For a moment his spirits had been raised when he heard from Kingswood that there'd been a message about the purple fibres found in Ian Mallows's fingernails. But it was just a memo to let him know the Chepstow lab had agreed with the Portishead lab that the fibres were from a carpet and wanted to do expensive gas chromatography tests before they gave him any more information.

  There was a few moments' silence before someone came to the door. The chief counsellor of the charity, Tommy Baines, wasn't what Caffery had expected on paper. He was in his late twenties, with the faint blue of a laser-treated tattoo on his neck and his hair closely shaved in a way that Caffery read as shorthand for aggression, past and present. There was something wrong with one of his eyes too, something that could have come from a fight. As Caffery flashed his warrant card he thought he saw, or imagined, a beat of anger in Baines's eyes — almost as if Caffery was an old mate who'd promised not to bother him at work but had turned up anyway. It was as if he'd been interrupted, and for a moment Caffery wondered if he'd blundered into something personal. As Baines unlocked the door, showed Caffery inside and locked up, Caffery got the clear idea there was someone else in the building, someone hiding in one of the darkened rooms. A woman maybe? He thought he could smell something. A perfume that might have been familiar. He scanned the corridor they walked up, registering where each door was, where it claimed to lead.

  'You can call me Tig,' Baines said, as he took him into the office. 'Name I got in prison. Don't ask why.' He picked up a stack of twelve-step sheets and threw them on to the photocopier, jamming his code in with his thumb, not looking at Caffery as if he wasn't much interested in him — as if he was used to the Bill turning up on his doorstep. 'We're hand to mouth at the moment. Small. No permanent beneficiaries so we're getting by on a donation here and there, and whatever fees we can pick up from the clients. The ones who can afford it, which is about none of them.' He spoke in a measured way, thinking every word through before he let it out of his mouth. 'It's me does everything. I'm the managing trustee, the only counsellor employed, and until we can afford it I'm housing-support officer too. This centre,' he raised a hand to indicate the building, 'is one of our donors. I get six free hours a week here.' He took the sheets from the feeder and put them into a transparent folder. He glanced at the vertical blinds, the industrial blue carpet, the impersonal chipboard desk and filing cabinets. 'Yeah, this is as near as I get to official premises. Apart from this and some relapse counselling for a residential programme over in Keynsham I basically run the charity out of my mum's flat. And she's a fruit, my mum.'

  It was getting dark outside, and except for the office the old Victorian school was deserted. Caffery put his hand on a chair. 'Can I sit down?' he said. 'I need to have a few minutes' chat if that's OK. Not in a hurry, are you?'

  At the copy machine Tig hesitated. Caffery thought his eyes flicked briefly to the door and he got the impression again that someone else was in the darkened building. Unfinished business. But it didn't go anywhere. Instead Tig gestured to the chair. 'Sure, sure. There's no one else using the place tonight. Sit, mate. I'll get the kettle on.'

  Caffery sat and watched him busy around, making tea, wiping out coffee cups with a green paper towel, scouting cupboards for a biscuit tin. While he waited he got out his notebook and the photo of Mossy, putting it face down on the big desk. This kind of interview drove him crazy: he'd never met anyone in drugs counselling who wasn't as closed as an arsehole, who didn't act like the police were asking for arterial blood when they asked to know about clients, and what was their problem? Didn't they get the concept of client confidentiality? The voluntary sector could be a bit easier than the statutories, not as hidebound, but even they didn't pipe out information for free.

  'You never get tired of it?' Caffery asked, as Tig handed him a mug of tea. 'Never want to tell them to go and get a life?'

  Tig gave a short laugh. He rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and sat down, legs crossed so his foot was resting on the other knee, balancing the tea mug on his ankle. 'Listen, mate, I know the police. You don't really give a shit how I feel about my clients. You're not here for that. So what are you here for? What do you want to know from me?'

  Caffery didn't speak for a second or two. He looked at Tig's eyes. The bad one was sort of grey and cloudy. A bit like a shitty London day. Caffery had a second of disorientation. A second or two where he couldn't read the guy at all. He turned over the photo of Mossy and held it out.

  'Recognize him?'

  Tig didn't hurry. He put the cup calmly on the desk, the handle to the side. He lifted his foot off his knee and put both feet on the floor, his hands on his thighs as he stood up and took the photo. As he examined it, Caffery thought he saw a contraction in the muscles at the corners of his eyes, no more than a millimetre's change. It came to him that Tig had already known exactly whose picture he was going to see.

  'No,' he said, holding it to the light, squinting. 'Nah, sorry, mate. Never seen him.'

  He held the photo out for Caffery to take, but he didn't. He was still watching Tig's face. 'You sure you don't know him?'

  'A hundred per cent. Never seen him in my life. Here — take it back.'

  Caffery waited a moment more. He was trying to get in under this bloke's cloudy eye, trying to get a flicker out of it, just a dilation in the pupil, anything to tell him he was lying. But there was nothing. Just this sort of weird evenness he didn't know how to interpret.

  In the end he took the photo, tucking it into his folder. He left his hand on it and thought about the next question he had to ask. And then, because he hated the question and because he knew where it would lead, he thought for a few moments about the girls on City Road and what he could be doing now instead of this. What he could be doing to forget. The thought made him want to sigh again. He took his hand off the folder.

  'Your clients,' he said. 'Do you s'pose any of them would recognize him? Maybe I could have one of my lads come out and have a chat to them?'

  Tig snorted. Gave him that look Caffery knew from years and years of doing the exact same thing in south-east London. 'I shouldn't have to tell you about client confidentiality. It's the backbone of the whole set-up. We'd be ruined if we ran around opening our arms to the police every five minutes.'

  'Yes. I know. But…' Caffery spoke slowly, ponderously, studying the backs of his own hands as if he was more interested in them than in the words coming out of his mouth. 'But do you know what I'm picturing?'

  'What?'

  'I'm picturing your future, Tig. I'm picturing your future and all the steps you can take to change it. And then, on the tail of that, I'm picturing all the peo
ple out there now, all the people this same thing might happen to in the future. The victims that aren't victims yet…' He let that hang in the air — the victims that aren't victims yet — so that its implication sank down a little. This was the best lever he had, to move the responsibility away from the police and on to the interviewee. 'Maybe even someone you care about. I'm picturing them, and I'm picturing their lives going ahead, happily, maybe having a house, a family. And then I'm seeing the opposite. I'm seeing them murdered. Mutilated. Hands taken off. With a hacksaw. An ordinary hacksaw you can buy in a hardware shop. What sort of a future is that?'

  He saw that Tig was caving. A little patch of white had started on his forehead, as if the blood had stopped flowing.

  'Look,' Tig said, 'I've got a responsibility to these lads.'

  'And to their futures. This guy on the photo — he's got to be a lot like some of your clients, same lifestyle. What that tells us is that if it happens again, it's likely to happen to someone a bit like him.'

  'But I can't have your people down here, can't do that. My clients'll never trust me again.'

  'It's your decision. It's only you who can decide to do the right thing.'

  There was another pause. 'Tell you what,' Tig said at last. 'If you leave the photo I'll let the guys see it. Maybe something'll come out of it like that.'

  'Can I rely on you for that?' Caffery wanted to play the game out a little further. 'The future victims… can they rely on you?'

  'Mate, listen now. I'm giving you a promise. OK? I make you a promise. You take it or you leave it.'

  Caffery slid Mossy's photo back out of his folder and passed it over. Tig picked it up, his face tight, contained. He put it on the photocopier and ran off copies, standing with his back to Caffery, who sat for a while, not speaking, wondering if there was something else he should be asking. On the floor near the photocopier was a bag he hadn't noticed before, a holdall with a fleece draped over it. He vaguely registered something familiar about its logo. It was making him drift a bit when Tig said, 'Do you know about me?'