Ritual jc-3 Page 3

  ' 'Scuse me?'

  He looked over his shoulder. A small woman was standing behind him. She had bright red hair tied with multicoloured rags into lots of little bunches all over her head. A waitress from the Station, by the apron round her waist.

  'Yes?'

  'Uh-' She wiped her nose and glanced over her shoulder into the restaurant to make sure she wasn't being watched. 'Am I allowed to ask what's happening?'

  'You're allowed.'

  She crossed her arms and shivered, even though it wasn't that cold out here, really not cold enough to make you shiver. 'Well, then… have they found anything?'

  Something about her voice made him turn and look at her a little more carefully. She was small and thin, wearing under the apron black combats and a T-shirt that said, I love you more when you're more like me.

  'Yes,' he said. 'They have.'

  'Under the pontoon?'

  'Yes.'

  She pulled a chair off the table and sat down on it, putting her hands on the table. Caffery watched her. There were two rings in her nose and from the way the holes were inflamed he guessed she fiddled with them when she was anxious. 'You all right?' he said. He stubbed out the roll-up, pulled up a chair and sat opposite her, his back to the Moat. 'Something on your mind?'

  'You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' she said. 'I mean, I can see by your face you wouldn't believe me.'

  'Try me?'

  She twisted her mouth and regarded him thoughtfully.

  She had very pale eyes, anaemic lashes. A cluster of spots round her nose had been covered with make-up. 'God.' She put her hands to her face, suddenly embarrassed. 'I mean, even I know it sounds mental.'

  'But you want to tell me. Don't you?'

  There was a pause. Then, as he'd expected, she put her hand up and started twiddling one of the rings in her nose, round and round and round, until he thought she was going to make it bleed. The only sounds were the water lapping at the quay, the dive crew clinking harnesses and cylinders. After a long time she dropped her hand and lifted her chin in the direction of the pontoon outside the Moat.

  'I saw something. Really late one night. Standing over in front of the Moat. Just where those divers are now.'

  'Something?'

  'OK. Someone. I suppose you'd say someone, although I really don't know for sure.' She shivered again. 'I mean, it was really dark. Not like it is now. Late. And I mean really late. We'd closed and someone'd puked all over the ladies' floor and who d'you suppose gets to clean up when that happens? I was walking through the restaurant with a bucket, on the way to the broom cupboard, and I was just crossing inside there, near the window…' She pointed into the Station restaurant to where a few diners had noticed the police screens and were craning their necks to work out what was happening. The sun was nearly touching the horizon now and he could see his and the girl's reflections on top of them, silhouetted in a blaze of red. 'And as I get to that table something makes me stop. And that's when I see him.'

  Caffery could hear the thickened clicking of the girl's breathing in her throat.

  'He was naked — I saw that straight away.'

  'He?'

  'My boyfriend reckons it was some traveller's kid. Sometimes they find their way down to the banks of the Cut. You can see them from the road, camped behind the warehouses with their washing out. My boyfriend said a kid because he was so tiny. He'd of only come up to here.' She held out her hand in mid-air to indicate a height of just over a metre. 'And he was black. Really, y'know, jet black, which is why I can't see it. Can't see him being a pikey.'

  'How old, then? Five? Six?'

  But she was shaking her head. 'No. That's just it. That's just what I told my BF. He wasn't young. Not at all. I mean, he was small, like a kid. But he wasn't a child. I saw his face. Just a glimpse, but it was enough for me to see that he wasn't a child. He was a man,' she said. 'A weird, weird-looking man. That's what's so effing freaky about it — that's why I know you're not going to believe me. That and…'

  'That and?'

  'And what he was doing.'

  'What was he doing?'

  'Oh…' She fiddled with the ring again. Moved her head from side to side, not looking at him.

  'Oh, you know…'

  'No.'

  'The usual — you know — what men do. Had his thing — you know.' She cupped her hand on the table. 'Had it out like this.' She gave an embarrassed laugh. 'But he wasn't just — you know, just some old wanker. I mean it must've been some kind of a trick, because this thing he had… it must have been something he'd strapped on cos it was… ridiculous. Ridiculously big.' She looked at him now, sort of angry, as if he'd said he didn't believe her. 'I'm not joking, you know. And I could tell he wanted whoever was in the Moat to look at it. Like he was trying to shock them.'

  'And was anyone in there? Any lights on?'

  'No. It was, like, two in the morning. Later I was sort of thinking about it and I thought maybe he was looking at himself in the reflection. You know — in the window? With the lights off inside he'd have been able to watch himself.'

  'Maybe.'

  In his head Caffery played it back: the restaurant deserted, the only illumination the coloured light of the optics and the Coors sign above the bar; outside the lights from Redcliffe Quay and the reflections in the water; a section of darkness between the river and the restaurant. He imagined the girl's blurred outline in the window as she walked across the floor with the bucket. He saw her face, white and shocked, ears tuning in to a small sound, eyes swivelling to focus out into the dark night. He saw a child's silhouette against the orange sky watching itself naked in a plate-glass window. A Priapus.

  'Where do you think he came from?'

  'Oh, the water,' she said, sounding surprised he hadn't figured that out yet. 'Yeah — that was where he came from. The water.'

  'You mean in a boat?'

  'No. He came out of the water. Swam.'

  'To the pontoon?'

  'I didn't see him arrive, but I knew that's where he'd come from because he was wet — just dripping. And that's where he went afterwards. Back in the water over there. There, where that red thing is now. Really quick it was, he was — like an eel.'

  Caffery turned. She was pointing to the red marker buoy in the water. Sergeant Marley — Flea — must be underneath it by now, because the surface crew were standing on the pontoon peering down into the water. There was a life line snaking up out of the water to the surface attendant and Dundas was talking in a low voice into the coms panel, but it was a struggle to imagine anyone was down there: the water was smooth, featureless, reflecting the red sky. Someone had brought out a 'dead stretcher', a rigid orange polyurethane block, and it lay expectantly on the decking ready to be thrown in. There was a weird silence hanging over the scene in the fading light — as if they were all listening to the water, waiting to see something shoot out of it. A human that looked like a man but was small enough to be a child, maybe. A human that moved like an eel.

  Caffery turned back to the girl with the red hair. Her eyes were watering now, as if she was reliving the fear, as if she was remembering something dark and wet slipping silently into the water.

  'I know,' she said, seeing his expression. 'I know. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I watched it for a while, moving along the wall and then…'

  'And then?'

  'It went under. Under the water without leaving a ripple. And I never saw it again.'

  Flea and her unit did more than just dive: along with normal support-unit duties, riot control and warrant enforcement, they were trained in confined-space searches and chemical and biological clear-up. The spin-off of knowing how to use all that protective clothing was that if ever a rotting corpse turned up in the area — in or out of the water — Flea's team was drafted in to remove it. They'd got so good at moving decomposed corpses that in December 2004 they'd been sent to Thailand to work on the disaster-victim identification exercise: in ten days the team recovered almos
t two hundred bodies.

  People couldn't believe she coped with it. Especially after the tsunami, they said. Didn't she have nightmares? Not really, she replied. And, anyway, we get counselling. Then they asked if she needed to do it, and wasn't pulling rotting bodies out of pipes and drains just wasting her talent? Surely, if she only had a word with her inspector and put in for her 'aide' transfer to CID, she could be in plain clothes. Wouldn't that be nice?

  She didn't answer. They didn't know she couldn't give it up. They didn't know that since her parents' accident the only time she could think straight was when she'd been able to return someone's body to the family, knowing that somewhere some mother or father or son or daughter could get a bit further along their recovery. And the diving — over everything it was the diving. Without the diving — which she'd been doing all her life with her family — she'd never get up in the morning. Under water was the only place she was herself.

  Except now, because this evening even under water she was uneasy. The water in the harbour had settled a bit and she was getting vague visual references if she used her torch. Submerged shapes began to appear in the murk; landmarks she recognized; a submerged heating tank chucked off one of the boats a month ago; a car about ten metres to her left — a Peugeot with its windscreen and tax disc still visible in the murk if you got close enough. It was an insurance jobbie, pushed in near the Ostrich Inn before the slip had been blocked. It had been there for almost six months before the dredger arm clunked against it one February morning. She'd searched and stropped it as a favour for the harbour master — now he was waiting for the crane to be serviced so he could lift it.

  But even though it was all familiar and straightforward — like a hundred other speculative searches she'd done — it didn't stop a weird apprehension settling round her as she worked. Some people said the harbour was strange: they talked about weird entrances that led from the bed out into a deeper underworld, like the bricked-over ancient moat that disappeared under Castle Green, joining the river Frome a quarter of a mile away in a dark, secret junction ten feet underground. But she'd dived it a hundred times before and she knew it wasn't that making her shaky. And it wasn't the deputy SIO either, even though she hated the way he looked at her, as if she was a kid, going straight through all her professional stuff and reminding her just how scary life was and how stupidly young she'd felt since the accident — even that wasn't enough to make her feel like this. No. In her heart she knew where this creepy feeling was coming from: it was from what she'd done last night in Dad's study.

  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?'

  5

  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 six
ty 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.