Ritual jc-3

by Mo Hayder

  'Don't you think it's a kick in the face of science?' David Marley was at the wheel, dressed in a corduroy jacket with a gypsyish spotted scarf tied at his neck. 'What they did to him in Africa? Calling him and the team immoral. I mean, since when has morality had a seat at the dinner table of science?'

  Flea could see it all in vivid colour. She remembered sitting in the back seat with Thom, both of them wearing shorts and Start-rite sandals. She remembered looking out of the window at the way the valley plunged from Kaiser's house into nothing. She remembered the house, she even remembered her mother's pink polka-dot blouse. But she couldn't remember anyone saying exactly what had happened to Kaiser in Africa. As if they hadn't dared voice the words.

  'Don't you think the university should be had up by the international community for sacking him?'

  'Not really,' Jill Marley said. 'If you want my opinion what he did really was immoral. It was outrageous. Inhuman.'

  'Inhuman?' David Marley swung the car angrily to a halt in front of the house. He switched the engine off and turned to his wife. 'How can you say that? How can you say that? Sometimes I think you're as bad as the rest of them.'

  'Oh, darling,' Jill had said, with a shrug. 'I'm sure you don't mean that…'

  So very typical of Mum, that little shrug — the casual way her shoulders went up. It was always the same: Dad wanting a fight, Mum soothing him, defusing the situation, catching him on his hindlegs so he had nowhere to go, with that little back-down, that little shrug.

  There was a crunch of wheels on gravel outside. Back in the present Flea sat up, blinking. A car had pulled up to the front of the house. After a moment or two she got up and went to the window, her thoughts moving slowly, woodenly. She pulled back the curtain, thinking how grainy the material felt in her fingers. Thom was getting out of his battered black car. She stood, a little dreamily, thinking how odd, she'd forgotten he was coming. He'd been right when he said she'd forget.

  He got out of the car and came round to the back, stopping briefly to look down the garden, and for a moment she was inside his head, seeing it through his eyes — the trees and the lake, the Bridge of Sighs, the way the terraces wound down and out of sight, disappearing into the tangle of fields. The way it was falling apart.

  She went to the back door and opened it. It was warmer outside than in. The sun shone on the black roof of the car.

  'Hi.'

  'Hi.'

  He was dressed a little clumsily, in a worn-out suit and tie, the toes of his shoes a little scuffed. She thought about the way he'd been sitting in her hallucination of the night in the hotel room, with their gear around them: the way Kaiser and her father had turned away from him so they could talk in private. Thom. Always the excluded one.

  She took down the Ford Focus keys from the back of the door, still a bit disconnected from her body, as if it wasn't really her hand reaching out to the hook, and handed them to Thom.

  'There's a full tank,' she began, then had to stop because there were tears in her eyes.

  'Flea?'

  She shook her head and put a hand on his arm, fixing her eyes on it, studying it, until she had the tears under control. 'Be careful,' she said, in a small voice. 'Please be careful.'

  He put his arms round her, and even though he was slight, not muscular, she felt momentarily enclosed by something — protected. He smelled of soap, something ridiculously floral, like geranium, because he'd never know to wear something manly. 'Don't worry about me. I'm a big boy now.'

  She wanted to say, No, you're not. You're still my little brother, but she didn't. She smiled and nodded, and when he'd gone she stood in the doorway for a long time, watching the evening sun moving across the terraces and thinking how different their lives could have been but for a sinkhole in a desert thousands of miles away.

  During that afternoon in the custody suite there was a moment when Mabuza's anxiety crossed into something more profound. If Caffery had had to describe it he'd have said it was the only moment he truly saw Mabuza afraid. Maybe with all the things they were discussing he had a reason to be afraid, but he only went to that deeper level when the conversation turned to the subject of the Tokoloshe.

  'Did Dlamini ever mention any interest in muti?' Caffery said. 'Witchcraft? Did he talk about using charms to ward off bad spirits?'

  Mabuza didn't move his eyes. But that didn't matter because Caffery had seen him swallow. His hard grey Adam's apple went up and down painfully, and Caffery didn't have to look down to know that his grip on the polystyrene cup was tightening. He knew they were getting close to something.

  'No,' Mabuza said quickly. 'No more than anyone else from our country.'

  'Do you know where he might have got hold of a vulture's head? Because it's quite a serious thing to have something like that. Vultures are on an endangered-species list.'

  'No idea, sir.' His eyes flicked up to the door, then back to Caffery's face. 'Really, no idea.'

  'I'm sorry. Did that question make you nervous?' Mabuza bit his bottom lip. 'You don't know what you're dealing with, sir. It's something you don't understand.'

  'Don't I?'

  'You're talking about something that is African. Something that belongs to Africa.' He pushed up the sleeve of his shirt and pinched up a chunk of his arm. 'It's in here. In our flesh. And not — ' he jerked his chin at Caffery and the officer in the corner. '- not in yours. Now, you don't meddle in these things. Don't meddle.'

  'That grease on your arms?'

  Mabuza blinked. He looked at them as if he was surprised to find them there. Then he tucked them away under the table.

  'Don't wipe it off — I know what it is. It's because of the Tokoloshe, isn't it? It's to ward him off.'

  At this Mabuza became very still. His eyes seemed to bulge and Caffery thought he was going to jump to his feet again. But he dropped his face, muttering in a low whisper a string of words in a language Caffery didn't recognize. Sweat appeared on his forehead.

  Caffery watched in silence, knowing this was something, a species of fear and anxiety, he'd never understand. When he'd asked the CSM if Mabuza's wife had seen him take the fibres, the CSM had said: 'She saw me do it as much as she could see anything. She was acting like she feared for her life if you want the honest truth.' And Mabuza's reaction now was fear. Real fear. Whatever he'd seen on the pontoon outside the restaurant, he'd believed it was real.

  'OK,' Caffery said slowly. 'I'll tell you what I think. I think you've seen something you can't explain. Because of that you've paid money — a lot of money — to someone to ward it off. You think you've seen a devil, a Tokoloshe, don't you? You think he's threatening your business — and now you'll do anything.'

  'Please do not meddle.' Mabuza raised a hand and tugged at his collar. Sweat was coming through his shirt, leaving circular marks on his chest. 'I asked you, do not meddle.'

  Caffery tapped his pen down once on the table, giving space in the room for his question to be heard. 'Did you know the superstition that if hands are buried under the entrance to a property they bring in business? Might undo the harm done by the Tokoloshe?'

  Mabuza looked up despairingly. There were faint stains round his eyes: tears of fear. 'You should stop this now.'

  'I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that you know exactly how those hands got under your restaurant.' He smiled. 'Now I don't know how I'm going to get you but, trust me, I will get you on something. Because you know what you've done is wrong. It couldn't be more wrong for another human being to die for the sake of your business. So I'd say the best thing you can do now is tell me who you paid.'

  'I haven't paid anyone for anything. I don't know how those hands got under my restaurant.' 'It must be someone who knows a lot about African traditions, or is getting the information from someone who does. Maybe it's an illegal who's trading his powers for protection and money. Is it someone at work? One of your employees?'

  'No. Forgive me, you've asked me this so many times. The answer's no. If you want
to know how those hands got under my restaurant you are asking the wrong man.'

  Caffery tapped his pen again, thinking about the fear in the guy's face. Half of him almost wanted to believe the bastard. 'Am I? Then who should I be asking?'

  He wiped his eyes and swallowed. 'The intellectuals.'

  'The intellectuals? What does that mean?'

  'The university men. There's a plan against me. I've got enemies. This is a plot to slur my name.'

  'Would you like to give me some names? Just something to be going along with.'

  'You know, sir…' He brought out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. He was still trembling. '… I have never had a strong stomach. And what you've found under my restaurant… This is not a good day for me. Not a good day at all.' He looked up at him with runny eyes. 'How did a hand come to be under my restaurant, sir? Does it mean my business will be finished?'

  There was a knock at the door. Caffery got to his feet and opened it. The office manager stood in the doorway, clutching a piece of fax paper he recognized immediately. It was from the lab. He took it and came back to sit down, placing it folded on the table where they could both look at it. He let a few seconds elapse before he spoke.

  'Sorry.' He held up the paper. 'This is from the lab. The report on the carpet fibres.' He sat back and opened it, unfolding it slowly, scanning it for the precise line he wanted, knowing he was closing in. 'As I was saying earlier, this morning we…'

  'What is it?' said Mabuza.

  But Caffery had just reached the relevant box. Matches zero. The carpet fibres on Mallows's hands hadn't come from the carpet in Mabuza's house. Caffery lowered the paper and gave the officer in the corner a wry smile. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

  'What?' Mabuza repeated, tears gone now, face tense.

  Caffery ran his fingers through his hair, letting his nails graze the skin. Suddenly he felt tireder than he had all week. 'Nothing,' he said, standing and kicking the chair under the table. Outside it was getting dark. The officers wouldn't have got round all the drugs charities tonight: they'd have to start again in the morning. Which was a bastard because now the fibres weren't matching he knew the charities was one of the only avenues left to them. 'It's nothing at all.'

  36

  Don't let them bring us up…

  It was late in the day and the shadow of the overhead light was long, reaching almost to the wall when Flea got up and dragged the old leather chair to the computer. Pulling a cardigan round her shoulders she switched on the computer and typed in 'Bushman's Hole'.

  At first, after the accident, she had monitored the web all the time. When the inquest and the investigation were over, she became addicted to the chatter in the diving community, the theories about what had gone wrong with that dive. It interested all divers, sport and commercial alike: they were afraid and excited by what it might mean. People from Tasmania to Bermuda to the Hebrides, with sig-lines like 'You never have to ask a good diver to go down' from every different time zone, they all hopped in and out of the discussion, adding their experience to the mix. Sometimes Flea would stay up at night silently watching the forums, watching them talk, hoping for a mention of Mum and Dad, hoping it would be more than just technical theories, liking it when they called Mum 'Jill' and Dad 'David', instead of 'the Marleys', winnowing through the chaff for a mention of what they'd been before they were the world's most notorious victims of a cave-diving accident.

  Getting into divenet, one of the biggest of the international dive websites, she scrolled down to the Trimix forums — Mum and Dad had been using Trimix to get down to one hundred and fifty metres; a controversial method that always got people talking. Sometimes people talked about Bushman's Hole here, too. Maybe there'd be someone who knew its shape, someone who knew the slope she'd hallucinated.

  As soon as she got into the forum she could see there had been more activity than usual. There had been fifty new posts in the last two days — usually the chatroom only attracted five or six a day. Someone must have dived a particularly difficult cave and be getting back-slaps. She didn't want to think of the other possibility: that someone else had lost their life the way her parents had.

  She scrolled down. As she did the hairs on her arms stood up. Navigating the mouse to the first thread she clicked again, her heart thudding as the message filled the screen. She read it once, and when she saw it wasn't a mistake she pushed aside the mouse and stared in disbelief at the screen, not seeing, not feeling anything. It was impossible. Impossible.

  It took her a few moments to realize the phone was ringing. She picked it up numbly.

  'Hello,' said the voice. 'Hello.'

  Flea leaned forward and clicked the next message in the thread. On the phone the woman was talking, but Flea wasn't listening — she was glued to the screen, reading the next message and the next. Her heart was thumping so loudly it was making her head hurt.

  'Hey, Flea? You there? It's Mandy. Flea?'

  Slowly Flea straightened the phone, holding it tight against her ear, her eyes still on the screen. 'Mandy?' she said faintly. 'Yeah. I'm here.'

  'You sound odd.'

  'No-'

  'Out of breath.'

  'No-'

  'Good. Then can I speak to your brother?'

  'My brother?'

  'Yes, Flea. Your brother? Thom? Remember him?'

  And then it all came back to her. The agreement. Thom and the car.

  'Flea? Is he there?'

  'Uh, yeah. Of course he's — uh — here.'

  'Can I speak to him?'

  'No. He's — he's in the garden.'

  'He's got his phone switched off.'

  'Oh,' Flea said faintly. 'Has he?'

  'Yes.' There was a pause. 'Flea, lovey, are you all right?'

  'I'm fine.'

  'You don't sound it.'

  'I am.'

  'Then just give Thom a shout, would you?'

  'No.'

  There was a pause, an intake of breath. Then Mandy said, a little quietly, 'No? Did you say "no"?'

  'I can't. He's…' She looked over her shoulder at the closed curtains. 'He's right at the bottom. All the way down by the lake.'

  'By the lake?'

  'There's a juniper down there — it's, you know… He's giving it a cut for me. I'll… I'll ask him to call you when he comes back up.'

  And before Mandy could say anything else Flea dropped the phone into the cradle, sank back into the chair, staring at the computer screen, not blinking, the words burning into her eyes. 'Mum,' she murmured, gripping the mouse and inching forward in the chair. 'Mum?'

  Ben Crabbick and Andy Pearl were in their twenties and had been diving since childhood. Two health-conscious, extreme-thrill-seeking Australians from the west coast, they had dived almost every cave known to mankind and between them had notched up five hundred Trimix dive hours. Once, in the infamous John's Pocket in Florida, Crabbick had got wedged by his cylinders into a small hole just fifteen metres from the surface. Pearl buddy-breathed him for twenty minutes while they struggled together to free him. Because they were panicking, they were down to their last five bar of air by the time they got to the surface. But even that experience, said Pearl on the divenet forum, was nothing compared to what had just happened in Bushman's Hole.

  Pearl was live online from Danielskuil, the town nearest to Bushman's Hole. He was safe and dry with a beer in hand, and now that things had settled he was telling the story to an avid audience, all firing questions at him. 'Me and Crabbick have been mad about Bushman's for years,' he typed. 'It's like the place gives off pheromones, you know, as if all those poor bastards that've died there are attracting the rest of us.' That, he said, could be the only explanation for why other divers insisted on venturing into the treacherous, never-ending watery funnel.

  Pearl and Crabbick had raised sponsors in Western Australia for the dive. Pearl wore a Suunto logo on his cylinders, while Crabbick's dry suit had blue and white flashes on the arms and back: the company co
lours of an Australian broadband provider. Every minute spent at depths of over three hundred metres added hours to their surfacing time, and every second increased the chances of narcosis, so they'd agreed twenty seconds on the bottom, just time enough to photograph each other and their logos, was sufficient to justify the dive. Pearl remained clear-headed enough to stick to the dive plan. Crabbick, the less experienced of the two, wasn't as resilient.

  They were at two hundred and fifty metres when Pearl suspected something was wrong with his dive buddy. Crabbick was complaining of a wah-wah sound in his helmet — a sound that to Pearl might mean there was still nitrogen in Crabbick's gas mix and that this was the onset of narcosis. His heart sank. He couldn't let him surface alone with narcosis even though it signalled the failure of the dive. Briefly, he even hated his old friend. But he knew what they had to do.

  'Hey,' he said, into his through-water coms mic. 'Let's start for the surface.'

  'No,' came the reply in his ear.

  'Yes,' Pearl said. It was pitch black down there and he held the torch on Crabbick's chest, not wanting to direct it on to his face and blind him. 'We're going back.'

  He shone the submersible torch upwards into the darkness and made a calculation: the first rescue diver would come down to the hundred-metres stage cylinders, the nearest human being, a hundred and fifty metres away, which would take them almost an hour with the right decompression stops. Pearl would lock Crabbick into the shot line and hold him there on the ascent. He hated having to turn back, but he knew he was still physically strong enough to get them both up. If they went now. 'We're aborting, Ben.'

  'No. Want to go all the way.' Crabbick was slurring. Another sign of narcosis. His gas mix was definitely wrong. 'No point otherwise.'