Ritual jc-3

by Mo Hayder

  'Christ,' he muttered, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. He'd have liked a whisky instead of the coffee, but if he let himself have one there'd be another on the heels of the first and before he knew it the day would be in the toilet. He scrolled down, looking for mention of human blood, but there was nothing, so, thinking of his visit to Rochelle's, he searched for the Tokoloshe.

  At first he put in the wrong spelling, TOCKALOSH, and the search engine came up with zero. He tried two more spellings, then TOKOLOSHE and this time the computer blinked and whirred and came up with a result. He found the section and had read a short way through when he had the urge to stand and pull the blind down because suddenly he didn't feel comfortable in the office and he didn't like the way he could be seen by anyone on the street.

  A Tokoloshe, the Acrobat file told him, was a sprite, a witch's familiar. Left to its own devices it was no more than a nuisance, but if it came under the power of a witch it became a danger, a thing feared and reviled. As Rochelle had said, some believed a bowl of human blood would appease a Tokoloshe, but there were other ways of protecting yourself: a cat, or an image of a cat washing its face, was enough to keep it at bay, or you could cover your skin with grease made from Tokoloshe fat, which you could buy from a witch doctor. Marilyn had scanned in an article about two men in South Africa arrested on an armed robbery. In their car the police had found a human skull with a piece of meat inside it. The robbers had stolen the skull from a grave and the meat was a meal for a Tokoloshe they believed was protecting them.

  Caffery clicked on the next slide and the screen filled with a crude drawing of a dwarf-like creature with a lolling tongue, proudly holding its cock up to the viewer. Reading the caption, his chair pulled close to the screen, the sun coming through the slits in the blind and heating his face, coldness crept through Caffery: 'The Tokoloshe's penis is a symbol of his danger and masculinity. Women put their beds on bricks to keep out of his reach. Traditionally a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank.'

  … a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank. Caffery read it again, his head thumping. He was thinking about the waitress at the Station — about the kid she'd seen exposing himself. And then, inexplicably, he thought about a wisp of shadow in an alleyway, the red of Keelie's lipstick, the sense that a foot had walked across the bonnet of the car. He got to his feet, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. On screen, the Tokoloshe grinned back at him.

  'Fuck off,' he muttered, hitting the button on the monitor rather than closing the file. 'Fuck you.'

  It was time to go back and see Rochelle. Time to ask her a few more questions.

  She was pleased to see him. He could see that right off. In a pink zip-up hooded top, her hair held off her face by a white headband, she looked as if she might have been getting ready for a workout in spite of the full make-up. She put her hands behind her back and leaned her bottom against the wall so her breasts were pushed towards him. 'Hello,' she said. 'Changed your mind about the beer?'

  'Can I come in?'

  She inclined her head and stood back to let him pass. He went through the kitchen into the living room. The two girls were watching America's Next Top Model. They were in exactly the same position as they'd been yesterday. If it wasn't for the fact they'd changed their clothes he'd have thought they'd been there all night. He stepped over their legs and went into the conservatory at the back.

  'Can I get you a drink?' said Rochelle, coming in behind him, bending to plump up the cushions. 'I've got a smoothie-maker. Me and the girls had strawberry and peach this morning.'

  'That's OK. Just had some coffee.' He reached inside his folder, feeling for the plastic wallet he'd brought. The Dobermann was on the floor in the sun, eyeing at him with vague interest. 'I won't be long.' He found the picture. It had been taken at a Chamber of Commerce event and it showed Mabuza clutching a glass of red wine, talking intently to a councillor. He was wearing a suit and a traditional mokorotlo hat over his greying hair. Caffery slid it out of the wallet and held it out to her. 'This guy. Ever seen him before?'

  Rochelle glanced at the photograph, then back at Caffery's face. 'Yeah — it's Gift, Kwanele's mate.'

  Caffery closed his eyes briefly.

  'What?' said Rochelle. 'What've I said?'

  'Nothing,' he said, putting the photo back into his jacket. What a fucking idiot he'd been not to ask her yesterday. He put down the folder and sat on the sofa, looking around the room, at the knick-knacks, the little vases and the framed photos of the kids. There was a picture of a cat — a kitten, actually — washing its face in a splash of sunshine.

  'Rochelle,' he said, 'do you remember you told me Kwanele was scared of a devil?'

  'A devil? Ain't likely to effing forget, am I? The Tokoloshe. Spent his whole time thinking about the bloody thing.'

  'Yes,' he said, watching her face. 'The Tokoloshe. And what did he tell you about it?'

  'Well, that's just it. He never told me about it exactly. It was Teesh he used to talk to.' She called into the living room, 'Hey, Letitia?'

  'Wha'?'

  'Come in here a second, beautiful.'

  There was a pause, then one of the girls appeared sullenly in the doorway, chin down.

  'Wha'?'

  'Say hello to Mr Caffery.'

  ' 'Lo,' she said.

  'Sometimes I think they liked Kwanele more than I did. Didn't you, Teesh, beautiful? Liked Kwanele?'

  'Yeah. Suppose.'

  'Bought you a Wii, didn't he?'

  'Yeah. He was cool.'

  'Now, baby,' Rochelle said. 'Remember the Tokoloshe? I want you to tell Mr Caffery about it.'

  Letitia peered over her shoulder at the skirting-board behind her — as if that was what really interested her and not Caffery. 'Really short. Lives in the river. Looks black.'

  'Speak up.'

  'I said. I said it's short. It's black. It's deformed. It lives in a river and it's always naked, OK?'

  'Letitia,' Caffery said slowly, 'how do you know about it? Did Kwanele talk to you about it?'

  'Yea-ah.' She made the one word go up and down so it sounded like a sentence: Yes, my God, didn't you know that? Where've you been all your life, you muppet? 'He only talked about it like all the time.'

  'What did he tell you?'

  'Just lo-oads. It eats people. I seen it once too.'

  'Teesh,' Rochelle said warningly, 'Mr Caffery's a policeman. You tell the truth now. Not what Kwanele told you to say.'

  Letitia looked at her mother, then at Caffery. 'I did see it,' she said. 'It was like totally weird. Mum just doesn't never believe nothink I ever say.'

  'Oh, here we go again.'

  Caffery held up his hand to pacify them. 'Letitia, where did you see it?'

  'Down by the river. Where Kwanele's warehouse used to be.'

  'And did anyone else see it?'

  'Just him and me. It was night. He took me there to do some — what d'you call it, Mum?'

  'Stocktaking.'

  'Stocktaking. And it was late and when we was coming out of the warehouse there's this sound in the bushes, like a bird or something, and there's this thing sort of half bent over. And water running off it. Which makes us both think it was coming out of the river.'

  'OK,' Caffery said, his head full of the dwarf in Marilyn's slide presentation, of the pontoon outside the Moat late at night. 'So you're saying Kwanele saw it too?'

  'Yeah — and he's like so scared. He starts going like this.' She put a hand on her chest and breathed in and out rapidly, hyperventilating. It was creepy, Caffery thought, sitting in the sunlight and watching this little girl acting it out. 'And then he puts his hand over my eyes and makes me get in the car, and he jumps in after me. And we was coming home and he keeps shaking and crying, and speaking African, and saying how he was going to do something about it. I mean, how scary is that?'

  'But he knew it was the Tokoloshe?'

  'Oh, yeah. He reckoned he was lucky him and his friend had someone who
knew what to do about it.'

  Caffery sat forward. 'What did he mean by that?'

  She shrugged. 'Someone who could get rid of the Tokoloshe — y'know, stop it coming too near him at his work and stuff.'

  'Did he say who his friend was?'

  'Nah, never said all that much.'

  Caffery turned to Rochelle. 'Was this the same time he bought the bowl? The one I took yesterday?'

  'Yeah,' she said. 'That's when it all kicked off.' Caffery put his elbow on the sofa arm and rested his chin on his hand, one finger under the tip of his nose, thinking hard. Someone had helped Kwanele Dlamini. The friend — it had to be Mabuza.

  'Letitia,' he said, after a while, 'you're sure you really saw the Tokoloshe?'

  ' 'Course I am. Just told you, didn't I?'

  'Teesh,' Rochelle hissed. 'Remember? The truth.'

  'It is the truth, I've told yer.'

  'It's what Kwanele told you to say.'

  'No,' the little girl insisted, a slow wash of colour coming up her face as she met her mother's eyes. 'It's not what he told me to say. It's what happened. I'm telling you the truth.' She let out a long, impatient breath. 'How comes you never fucking listen to me?'

  Before Rochelle could answer Letitia turned on her heels, her fists balled, and went into the sitting room. She said something to her sister, who got up, shooting her mother a pointed look. Then there was the sound of their feet on the stairs and a door banging.

  After a few moments Rochelle breathed out. She looked despairingly at Caffery. 'You got kids, Mr Caffery? Any little ones?'

  He shook his head. He was thinking about what Letitia had said: He reckoned he was lucky him and his friend had someone who knew what to do about it. It was making him think about things he hadn't thought about until now.

  'Well,' said Rochelle, 'let me give you some advice. Don't. Don't even think about it.'

  Outside Rochelle's it was a cool spring day, the acid-green ornamental trees and the tended grass in the development every now and then giving the faintest stir in the breeze. But for Caffery, sitting in the car, his hands resting on the steering-wheel, it might as well have been mid-January. He wasn't thinking about the blossom on the branches or the way the sun was so high in the sky or the slight rise in temperature. He was thinking about circles. About rings.

  Criminal behaviour was like a sponge: it sucked others into it. Almost every idiot he'd ever picked up over the years had had a little coterie attached. If you thought about it, it wasn't much different from any other social group. Every ring had a different structure, a different size, a different satellite configuration, but they had one thing in common: they had a leader. Sometimes the group was so loose the MC didn't even realize he was boss. But on the whole, in most rings, the one who was in charge knew exactly what he was doing.

  Somewhere, out there in Bristol, someone knew more than was good for them about the African continent. They might be British, they might be African. They certainly knew a little too much about African ritual and belief; they knew very well how deep superstition ran in people; and, more importantly, they knew how much money could be attached to fear. It wouldn't be difficult to pinpoint wealthy Africans living in the country.

  Nor would it be difficult to hire someone, some poor bastard who'd never have the luxury of normality from all Caffery'd been told, to loop up some ridiculous fucking dildo, grease themselves up and appear to the right person at the right time. Nothing too obvious, a fleeting glimpse. A shadow. Just enough to convince someone superstitious enough they were being stalked by a demon. And then the brains in the operation would go in for the kill, providing the goods to ward off the Tokoloshe, keep it away from the business. Human blood. And for proof that the goods were genuine, a video, real or a clever fake.

  Mabuza. Caffery hadn't met him but he remembered his voice — sort of even and measured, a little too educated for comfort. He pulled out his work phone and stabbed in a number. He was going to get Interpol to track down Dlamini and then he'd get the surveillance guys to knock on Mabuza's door. They were going to ask, respectfully, whether he'd consent to the house being searched. And then, also respectfully, they'd offer him a lift to the station. Because Caffery was going to have to do this interview a little earlier than he'd hoped.

  The phone clicked through, and he let his eyes wander over to the Nailsea skyline. He was thinking about a human being with dwarf legs: a squat half animal that ran through the streets at human knee height. And he was thinking about African witchcraft, secret rituals being practised behind closed doors. Someone was engineering it, he was sure, but he still had to blink to make sure he was seeing only sky and buildings, because right now, sitting here in the sunshine, he wasn't sure he'd ever get the image of the Tokoloshe out of his mind.

  32

  On Kaiser's sofa — eighteen hours since the ibogaine trip had begun, Flea came to life again and began to remember who she was and why she was there. She felt as if she'd been to a different planet, as if half of her was still out there somewhere, struggling to find its way back into her body. She sat up gingerly, blinking in the first grey light of morning filtering through the window. After a while she pulled her feet up on to the sofa and slowly, slowly, pulled off her socks.

  The problem with her feet had started a few days after the accident, and now it had got to the point that she was so ashamed she wouldn't take her shoes off if anyone was watching. Her feet seemed veined and misshapen, awkwardly crabbed like a monkey's or a lemur's — they made her think of the hand she'd brought to the surface from under the harbour, the brutal way it had been removed from the body. She squeezed the webbed skin experimentally between her thumb and forefinger and, briefly, it seemed to liquefy, to run away leaving her toes free and independent. She stopped moving, trying to keep still, waiting for the drug to stop working. After a while her vision cleared and the skin was back, tethering her toes together. Life was so unpredictable. The things that stayed longest in your mind were always the things you hadn't foreseen.

  She pulled on her socks and was about to roll back on the sofa, when something made her stop. Someone was watching her. In the doorway, under the rolled-up plastic sheeting, a figure stood perfectly still.

  For a moment it was as if nothing in her body moved, not her heart or her lungs, because she was looking at a creature, a dead creature that should have been lying on the ground, but instead was standing up in the doorway. Its clothing was billowing round it, just like Mum's in Boesmansgat. Its face was a bony mass.

  'Mum?' she whispered. 'Mum?'

  'There now,' the dead animal said, and its voice was not Mum's but Kaiser's. 'Flea?'

  There was a pause when she didn't know what to say. Then, in a hoarse voice, she whispered, 'Kaiser?'

  The creature moved, turning its face, and as it did, Kaiser materialized from inside it, smiling out from the corpse. Her vision cleared and it was just Kaiser again, dressed in an unfamiliar white shirt, looking very tired. 'Phoebe?' he said, coming into the room. 'How are we feeling?'

  She shook her head, not taking her eyes off him.

  'Are you all right?'

  'Yes. I mean… it's still there. The drug — it's still there.' She licked her lips, trying not to think about the death mask. 'I mean you — just now. I thought…'

  'Yes?' he said slowly, taking a step into the room. She'd forgotten how tall he was. How tall, and how heavy his head was.

  'Nothing.' She rubbed her eyes and tucked her feet under her on the sofa. 'It was just the drug.'

  He was holding a glass of water and he handed it to her now. He sat down on the sofa next to her, making it bow with his weight. She tried not to look at him. She wanted to say: 'They're not at the bottom.' But she didn't. Instead she sipped the water and kept track of him out of the corner of her eye, thinking of the animal skull.

  'I was sick,' she said, after a while. 'You told me I'd be sick.'

  'It gets most people like that.'

  She looked at the bowl
on the floor. 'You cleaned it up for me. I didn't even hear you come in.' She blinked. Everything was familiar, yet strange: the edges on all the objects were hazy and brown, crawling a little as if they were outlined with a column of ants.

  'Would you like some more water?'

  'I've got a headache,' she said numbly. There was something about his shirt that she thought she should mention, but her head hurt too much. 'A headache.' She wiped her face with her palms. She took some deep breaths. 'Kaiser. Do you — do you remember my feet?'

  'No.'

  'At Bushman's Hole, I didn't dive because…'

  'Because you'd cut your feet on some glass. Yes. I remember that.'

  'Except,' she murmured, 'except… I didn't. I didn't cut them.'

  He laughed gently. 'Well, I saw blood. I helped you dress them. I pulled a piece of glass out from between your toes. I don't think that was your imagination.'

  'No. It happened, but it wasn't an accident. Not an accident at all.' She pressed her fingers hard into her temples, wanting her head to stop seesawing. 'I went and found the glass. I got a bottle from the hotel bar and smashed it in the car park. Then I trod on it.'

  Kaiser was silent. Not an animal skull. Just Kaiser. 'You know there's something — something different about Thom?'

  'Different?'

  'Yes. We never actually said it but we always knew something was slightly wrong. Poor little sod. But he's OK, you know. As long as he's got instructions, he knows how to follow them. The only thing wrong with him is he's not flexible — he can't think in an emergency.' She pressed her fingers harder into her temples, speaking slowly and clearly: 'He should never — never have been with them. Not on his own that deep. I let him go because…' She shook her head, trying to shake away the guilt, wishing it would lift off her like a skin. 'I was scared, Kaiser. So scared. You don't know what Dad was like. He was… We couldn't be weak around him. If we showed fear or weakness it just — just finished him. I didn't want to go into that hole so I trod on the glass.'