by Mo Hayder
They didn't answer, but one held up a remote control and turned the volume down a few notches. The woman took him through etched-glass double doors into a palm-filled conservatory looking out over a fenced garden with a pink and lavender swing seat in the centre of the patio.
'Nice kids,' he said.
'Yeah.'
She pushed a Dobermann from where it sat on a wicker sofa. It loped away into the living room, its claws ticker-tickering on the tiles, and she bent over to plump up the cushions, blowing off dog hairs.
'He was importing stuff, gave the business his best shot, and when that didn't work out it was like everything fell apart.' She pressed the cushion on to the sofa and stood back to allow Caffery to sit. 'I can't tell you where he is. I tried to get in touch with him, but he's disappeared. Back home.'
'This his house, then?'
She snorted. 'Oh, please. Do me a favour. It was my ex's, before Kwanele, but now it's mine and the girls'. And long may it last.'
'The girls aren't his?'
She gave him a look, as if she thought he was joking. 'You winding me up? Do they look like his?'
'I don't know — I've never seen a photo.'
'Well, he's black,' she said condescendingly. 'Very black. South African.' She sat at a small glass table, crossing her legs prettily. The long blonde ponytail hung down over her shoulder. She looked as if she spent a lot of money in tanning salons. 'What do you want to know about him? See, me, I don't care how much trouble I get him in. I'll tell you anything you want.'
Caffery took his jacket off, draped it over the arm of the chair and sat down, rolling up his sleeves. It was hot in here. Still only May, but the conservatory soaked up the sun. 'Who are you?'
'Rochelle,' she said, offering him a well-manicured hand. 'Rochelle Adams.'
He shook it. 'Rochelle,' he said. 'What I'm thinking about here is about religion. Mostly that's the question I have about Kwanele. I'm wondering about his beliefs.'
'He didn't have none. No church, if that's what you're asking.'
'What about other beliefs? Beliefs from his old country.'
'Oh, that.' She put a long nail into her flossy hair and itched, her eyes half closed. 'Yeah — that was part of our problem. I mean, he loved me and he loved the girls, but he never really gave up all the shit from back home.' She dropped her hand and looked at him as if a lightbulb had just come on. 'It's that vulture, isn't it? That's why you're here. I hated that thing — it stank like someone'd died in that car. I wouldn't let the girls in there, not with that thing dangling like it was watching you.'
'So why the vulture? Do you know what it meant to him?'
'The lottery, weren't it? The vulture, you know, sees into the distance. So the idea goes, according to Kwanele, you get the vulture's vision. You can see into the future, see the numbers or something. And the worst thing is, two weeks after he got the bloody thing, he only turns round and wins. Just like he said, nearly a grand, so I'm, like, not a leg to stand on. And he's like, "This is great — I'm going to make it into soup — drink it, get even more power out of it." And I'm "No way, Kwanele, no way." So he doesn't make it into soup, but he won't take it out of the car either. Except then you lot have it off him and turns out it's not a vulture after all, and there's me, laughing my knickers off. You can imagine, can't you?'
'Is that the only superstition he brought from his country?'
'God, no. It was everything with him. There was this bit of dolphin tail on a gold chain round his neck. Only little.' She held out her fingers, showing him how big, a gap of about an inch between the thick-polished nails. Her bracelets jingled and collided with each other down her tanned arm. 'He was like, "It's for sociability", and when I asked him why a dolphin, because I love dolphins, me, he goes on about how dolphins swim in a pack and how this bit of bling is somehow going to make sure he's always swimming in a pack, and I'm just livid, me, because I love dolphins, and I'm like that.' She held up her hand so her palm was facing the imaginary Dlamini, and cocked her head, suddenly all sass. ' "It's me or the charm, Kwanele." ' She sighed and dropped her hand, half smiling, half exasperated. 'And you hear all these stories, don't you? About how the blacks are repressed in South Africa or whatever, but you meet someone like Kwanele and, honestly, you can't help thinking, Yeah, I'd bleeding repress you, mate, with that crap coming out of your mouth. I mean, dolphins, for Christ's sake. What did they ever do to hurt him?'
She stood, went to the long low sill that ran round the conservatory and picked up an earthenware jar painted with geometric designs. It was about as big as a large grapefruit and it had a little lid that she took off delicately. 'This was what he picked up last November after he got it into his head there was a devil following him.' She brought it over to show Caffery, holding it out on her flat palm. He looked inside. It was dark and stained. 'Meant to be a charm. Defence. He said it was all right for a woman, she only had to sleep with the Tokoloshe to stop it, but a man, well, it was harder for him to get rid of it.'
'Get rid of the what?'
'The Tok-o-loshe. Don't ask me how they spell it — some African word, innit?'
'What's the Tokoloshe?'
'Name of the devil he reckoned was after him. Always crapping himself about the Tokoloshe — said he'd do anything to stop it.' She put the lid back on the pot. 'I kept it 'cause I like the pot.' She held it up and admired it. 'Pretty, isn't it? I like all these ethnic things, me.'
'Can I see it?'
She handed it to him. He weighed it in both hands. It was heavy, and weirdly warm, as if it had trapped the heat of the spring sunshine on the windowsill. He lifted the lid again.
'What're the stains?'
'Blood. That's what a man has to offer the Tokoloshe. A bowl of blood.'
Caffery looked up. 'Blood?'
'Only chicken blood or something,' she said. 'Smelled effing awful after a day, so I made him put it in the garden, and the next morning the pot was on its side and the blood was gone, and all we could think was an animal came in the night. That, or the dog.' She gave the Dobermann a dubious look where it lay in a patch of sun, blinking. 'Course Kwanele told me it was human blood, trying to scare me, but I'm like, yeah, where'd you get human blood? The same place you got your so-called vulture?'
'He said it was human blood?'
She snorted. 'Yeah, as if. But Kwanele? One hundred per cent convinced. Pays a shitload for it, says he knows it's true because he's seen the video of the blood being taken.'
'There's a video?'
'Nah. He was just saying it, weren't he? I mean, if it existed it'd be like a snuff movie, wouldn't it? And there's no way I believe snuff movies exist.' She scratched the tip of her nose thoughtfully. 'What about you? You're police. You ever seen a snuff movie?'
'No,' Caffery said quietly. 'At least, not the type you're talking about.'
She smiled. As her lips parted the frosted lipstick held them together a fraction longer than they would naturally, then popped to reveal perfect teeth. 'Yeah, I bet you've seen some things in your time. I bet you have.'
When Caffery had arranged for someone from Portishead to come and pick up the earthenware jar, he stayed with Rochelle for another thirty minutes, asking her questions. She was polite, cooperative, but he wasn't stupid. He knew what was happening in her head — he could tell from the way she pulled her feet up under her on the sofa, the way her fingernails made little circles on her collarbone while she was talking. He left open in his head the idea of whether he'd try to take her to bed. He was easy about it. Either he did or he didn't. As it worked out, by the time they'd finished talking he decided he liked her a little more now than he had when he'd walked in and that she didn't deserve the shit he'd bring to her doorstep so he dropped the idea. After half an hour he got up and thanked her. They were almost at the front door and he could see she was irritated he hadn't made a move. When he hesitated, he knew she thought this was the moment when he would ask her.
'Yeah?' She rested her hand on t
he hall radiator and cocked one knee a little in front of the other, pushing her hip out to the side. 'You forgot something?'
He looked at her neck, at the bangles on her tanned arms, then back at her face. 'In case you're wondering, I think you're very pretty.'
She blushed. He hadn't thought it was in her to blush. 'Yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, lot of good it does me.' She pushed her hair behind an ear, lowered her eyes and waited for him to answer. When he didn't she smiled. 'Do you — uh — want to stay for coffee?' She twisted her knee round a little towards the radiator, opening her leg outwards from the hip. 'Or beer. I've got some in the fridge.'
He looked at her thigh in the jeans. Then he looked at her manicured hand on the radiator. Earlier she'd told him she was a manicurist and did lots of acrylics. She'd said she thought a good set of acrylics was the sexiest thing a woman could get to please a man.
'Thanks, but I'll have to pass.' He got out his keys. 'Don't think of it as a missed opportunity.'
'No?'
'Not at all. Think of it as a lucky escape.'
29
Flea had no idea how the ibogaine trip was going to be. What if she decided to go for a walk or, worse, tried to drive? She had to lock herself down, so they'd decided Kaiser would wait, not where she was sitting — on the sofa in his big, untidy living room — but within earshot: in the kitchen or the study. He'd rolled up the plastic sheeting in the doorway so he could hear her, assembled three electric fires round the sofa to keep the chill away, and now she could hear him shuffling around the other rooms in his tatty slippers.
Taking the ibogaine was like chewing bitter liquorice sticks — a chunk of fibrous root that made her jaw ache and also made her gag. She finished it then sat down on Kaiser's sofa to wait. For a long time she was sipping water and rubbing her tongue across the back of her teeth, trying to take away the fur that had stuck there.
Out of the dirty window the unkempt field where dandelion and bindweed grew was bathed in sunlight. Even in the daytime you couldn't see much from this vantage-point, just the tops of the trees in the Mendip land of neolithic ghosts, medieval cathedrals, legendary caves. Kaiser's rambling garden was so pocked with sinkholes and craters from the old mines that her mother wouldn't let them play out there as children. She'd said there were entrances to shafts that a child could fall down to their death and that she wouldn't put it past Kaiser to have left them open. It was funny, Flea thought, how Jill never realized it would be her, not her kids, who would end up dead at the bottom of a hole.
She sighed and pulled her feet up under her, arranging the dusty old duvet across her legs. She closed her eyes for a while and tried to fix in her mind the position of the bodies in Bushman's Hole. She pictured how Dad might have looked as he started the head-first descent to the bottom. She'd done a mathematical formula and decided that, fully kitted out as her parents had been, they'd have gone down at about twenty metres a minute. With almost a hundred and fifty metres to go, that slow glide to the bottom of the hole would have taken them eight long minutes. At what point they'd died was anyone's guess.
And then, as she thought of those eight minutes, she realized something she'd never thought of before: that she could see time. You'd never notice it usually, but now it was clear that time was divided up into visible portions if you knew how to look at it, and that things had always been like this, since the very beginning. Some time packages were big and some were small, and each had different colours according to its size: the smallest ones, the ones that represented just enough time to dodge a bullet or a punch, were small and cherry red — time splinters. The ones that were long enough to stop someone choking, or to run after and catch a ball, or to lose control and crash a car were a juicy orange, slightly puffy at the edges. Sleep used pale yellow cubes — eight-hour chunks that got fractured and split open unnaturally when she woke early, and that was why everything felt wrong during the day.
She kept her eyes closed and studied the time packages, and the way they made up her future, stretching out into the distance — lots of little shapes packed together in a long line. There was a noise coming from a distance behind the shapes. Wah wah wah. Soft at first, but getting louder. Wah wah wah. She twitched her head away because it was a noise she hated as a diver, the sort that could mark the onset of a toxicity overload, but this time it seemed to be outside her head, coming in across the fields through the closed window. Wah wah wah. Wah wah wah. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the sound drifting in, but instead she saw that the room had changed beyond recognition.
A crack had formed in the far wall. She stared at it, mesmerized, as it lengthened, shimmering silver as if the entire room was peeling itself. There was a noise as if the centre of the earth was splitting and, just in time, she understood what was happening. She threw her hands into the air as, all at once, the ceiling caved in and rolled sideways. Her ears filled with a racing noise. A heavy, unbearable light dropped hard on her, submerging her, making her cling desperately to the sofa, knowing that if she was washed away nothing could bring her back.
When at last the noise had stopped she lowered her arms cautiously and twisted her head. Nothing was as it had been. Everything had changed. Even the air was different: instead of being clear, it was silver and wavering. Beams of white light rippled through from overhead, silt swirling through them. She knew, just from the feeling of cold and dread, where she was. She was in Boesmansgat. A place for the foolish and the dead. Bushman's Hole.
She tried to wriggle away, but instead of moving backwards into the sofa the water seemed to lift her and roll her over, and before she knew what was happening she was swimming, shooting fast through the cold. She sculled a little with her left hand, turning herself in a small circle because she couldn't orient herself immediately and, to start with, wasn't even sure which way was up. The light rays were there again, but this time they were sharp, like submerged stalagmites, and she didn't dare swim near them, thinking they might cut her. She steadied herself and began to swim slowly, the sweetest, absolute clarity flashing against her face, no bubbles, just the currents streaming around the dry suit. Gin clear. Now she understood what those words meant. Gin. Clear.
She'd swum for some time, going nowhere, knowing now what it felt like to be a fish, when she noticed radiance coming from the right. She brought herself to a halt and turned to it. It was the entrance to a cave, brightly lit, and after a moment's hesitation she swam towards it. As she came within ten metres of it, she saw there were figures inside the cave, lit up like a nativity scene in a church. Three faces in the yellow light, Dad's, Thom's and Kaiser's. It was a room she was looking at: there were two beds, a chair with a suitcase on it, a print of an orchid on the wall above Dad's head and dusty curtains against the window. She recognized it: the Danielskuil hotel room they'd stayed in the night before the accident.
'Dad?' she said tentatively, her mouth moving slowly. 'Dad?'
The sound came back, louder this time, wah wah wah, and, like a film coming off pause and cranking up, the figures in the room began to move. They bent towards each other, talking in low voices, checking their dive gear, and she realized, from the way her feet began to hurt, that this wasn't an hallucination but a memory, that she had been in this room too — somewhere she fitted into this tableau, off to one side, out of the immediate picture, but there anyway, because that night she'd been sitting on a bed with her feet wrapped in bandages, watching the men check the gear.
Kaiser and her father moved aside a little, turning slightly away from Thom, who might have been close enough to overhear their conversation but was so busy repacking the scrubbers on the rebreather units that he didn't pay them any attention. They made it seem casual as they murmured to each other under their breath. It was a private conversation — they were sharing a secret, but Flea could lip-read. She could understand every word they were saying.
Is it strange? Dad said, looking up into Kaiser's face.
Is w
hat strange?
You know. To be back. In Africa.
This is South Africa. Not Nigeria. This isn't the place it happened.
Flea could read every word — it was like having her memory scrubbed clean and bright and replayed at high definition. Every pixel was brilliant in its clarity and the picture stayed quite still, undisturbed by water eddies and silt.
Even so — it must be odd after all these years. Do you think you could come back and live here?
No, Kaiser said, and his face was momentarily sad, old. You know the answer to that. You know how they tried to show me up — make an example of me.
The two men continued what they were doing, cleaning masks, checking cylinders, and for a while there was a companionable silence. Dad checked the straps on his buoyancy compensator and, satisfied, put it to one side. Then, empty-handed and finished with his tasks, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Thom wasn't listening, then leaned forward to Kaiser. Listen, he whispered. This is important.
Kaiser seemed surprised by the tone. What? David? What is it?
Dad leaned closer, and spoke. But this time half of his mouth was obscured and all Flea could make out were the words down there… promise… be sure… experience…
She stared at him, her heart thumping, but just as she was about to swim nearer, to ask him to repeat what he was saying, something in her peripheral vision made her stop. Moving cautiously because she felt that if her head rocked she'd be sick, she turned towards it.
A long spit of sand lay in the gloom to her right. Slowly, slowly, as her eyes adjusted, shapes began to appear out of the dark. First a skeletal hand, raised up and splayed in the frigid water, the neoprene suit ending at the bony wrist. Then another hand, light lasering eerily between the fingers. Her heart thumped. Another shape was dissolving out of the gloom near the first: the hunched and awful figure of a diver, stiffly jackknifed, its head buried face down in the silt, the word 'INSPIRATION' stencilled on the cylinders. Two bodies — only ten metres away — she could almost touch them. Her throat tightened as she swam towards them, looking at the terrible positions, knowing she was seeing Mum and Dad.