Ritual Read online

  'OK,' Caffery said, taking BM's arm and lifting him to his feet. 'Your gear's not going anywhere for a minute or two. Nice and safe under that old lady's doormat. Let's have a little sit-down and get this on paper.'

  The thing about Flea, Caffery thought, was get her out of the water and she always seemed a little on edge. Sort of guarded, as if she expected you to tell her some really bad news. It was the first thing he'd thought when he'd seen her in the car park at HQ that afternoon.

  It had been a dry day for the investigation. In the statement BM hadn't been able to give them much more than he'd told Caffery in the first five minutes in the stairwell: Mossy, he said, was the kind to take up with anyone he met – an idiot, really. He'd go off with anyone who looked at him, and there wasn't any more to the conversation about the sickos than he'd already told Caffery. He gave them about forty names, about twenty locations he knew Mossy sometimes hung out, and the names of seventeen drugs-counselling sessions, but no, apart from that time a long time ago he was just guessing really. He didn't have any idea if Mossy had been to any of them recently, and actually, what he wanted to know was how the fuck had those people kept Mossy still long enough to cut his hands off? Not much to go on for Caffery, but the SIO wanted 'afternoon prayers' – the afternoon round-up of the day's events at HQ, where he'd got another meeting. So it was off to Portishead.

  He had just parked the staff X5 and was heading for the chrome and glass atrium, batting out the creases in his suit jacket for his meeting with the SIO, when he saw her coming purposefully across the grass towards him. Her hair was wet and slicked off her face and she was dressed in civvies, old jeans and a grey tank top, with her arms bare.

  'Inspector Caffery,' she called. 'How are you?' She looked on edge, from the way she was trying to catch up with him, the way she had her hands pushed into her jeans pockets, as if she didn't trust them not to wave around. Everything in the West Country was different, he thought. He didn't remember a patch of grass like this at Scotland Yard or anyone like her in the force. She fell into step next to him, as if she'd been invited to and they were on their way to the same meeting.

  'Any news,' she said, 'about the case?'

  'Yeah.' He watched her sideways as they walked, a little wary of her. 'We've got an ID. We know who owned the hands.'

  'An ID?'

  'From the dabs. Ian Mallows, a.k.a. Mossy. A smackhead from one of the estates.'

  'Anything else?'

  'Fibres under the nails. You must've bagged the hand well because they were still there. Purple fibres. Like a carpet.'

  'Hey,' she said casually, glancing at the glass building they were heading towards, 'you don't – you don't know why someone cut off his hands?'

  He stopped. 'No,' he said. 'I don't know why.'

  'Such a weird thing to do.' She halted and looked at him in a way that made him stop too. It was as if there was something she wanted to say but was keeping back. She held his eyes seriously. 'I mean, why would someone do that?' She moved a little closer. 'Did you know he's African?'

  'What?'

  'The owner of the Moat. He's African. Do you think that might be something to look at?'

  Caffery frowned, taking in the shock of blonde hair. There was nothing about her face, he thought, that suggested she could take all the hard knocks in the job. Except maybe her nose, which had a slight wideness that didn't quite fit, as if she might have broken it years ago. To him she had the look of something too fanciful, not quite real. A bit like the way she was talking now.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'Do I think what might be something to look at?'

  'Only that he's African and there might be a connection. Between him being African and there being hands buried so close to the entrance.'

  Caffery laughed. He wondered if he was being had. 'This is a joke, yeah? I'm supposed to try to work out what you're saying.'

  There was a few moments' silence, then something in Flea's face cleared. 'It's none of my business,' she murmured, scratching her head distractedly. 'But I'm trying to work out how those hands came to be under the restaurant.'

  'I don't think we're going to have to look much further than the nearest drug deal gone wrong. We're not going to be letting the location lead the investigation any more.'

  'No?'

  'No. The victim's where we're taking it from now. He had serious smack history, always trying to get clean, you know the story – DTTOs stacked up so high. The only witness statement we could pull out today has him being pretty bloody scared about something that happened to him at some drugs counsellor's. So that's being actioned even as we speak. About a hundred drugs charities to sift through and I think—' He broke off. Flea's expression had changed. Her eyes were suddenly hard and guarded, flashing something he wondered if he'd be stupid to mess with. 'And I think that's where we'll find the lead,' he finished thoughtfully. She was still staring at him. 'What? Why you looking at me like that?'

  'Nothing,' she said. 'I should let you get on with it.' And she took a step backwards, still holding his eyes as if she expected him to jump her. Then she began to walk away, pulling her phone out of her pocket and banging out a text with her thumb.

  Somewhere Caffery'd heard that teenagers were getting over-developed thumbs from all the texting they were doing – he'd've liked to say something to her about it.

  '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 th
e 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. There 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 w
alked 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.