Ritual

by Mo Hayder

  'You don't think that could be considered offensive?' he goes, and there's sort of a note in his voice that Mossy knows is all wrong, like a warning. So it's time to get out, and he mumbles something about not meaning to offend no one, and waits for the subject to change. Then he gets up, quiet as he can, stashes the plastic chair against the wall, and goes outside. He walks away from the clinic, lights a roll-up and finds a place a little down the road where he can see the front of the clinic and everyone coming out of the doors, and he waits, feeling the cramps coming slowly through him from front to back. They're the worst of the agonies, the cramps, the first to come and the last to leave. He sits down and hugs his belly, wondering if there's a karsi round here. It's a warm day and that helps, and if he keeps humming it'll take his mind off it.

  After a while the doors open. He can feel the moderator staring at him, but he's not going to be intimidated, so he waits while the others come out. He's like a hyena, picking off the softest-looking ones who go round the edge of the pack, the ones who'll fall for a story – you can spot them, something about the hope in their eyes: like they really believe people can be redeemed. Mossy waits till they pass, then falls into stride next to them, hands in his pockets, head down a little so he can sway it a little sideways and mutter, 'Got anything to help me, there? Hmm? Just a little? I'll pay you back. Can promise you that.' But they mutter and cross the road heads down, like they don't want to be seen with him, leaving him standing there, the sweats starting, and the itching, and when he walks back to his spot he can feel his kneebones rubbing each other raw. Is that because he's too thin or is it something else? Is it because of something weird his skin is doing?

  When they've disappeared he tries to bum some money from a passer-by, but she walks past, eyes on the distance, so after a while he decides to go down the docks, see if there's anything happening down there. Maybe one of them from the Barton Hill estate'll be there in a good mood. If not, he'll think again.

  He's just got up and is ambling along when it happens. One minute he's on his own thinking bad thoughts, next minute, walking next to him is this tiny, skinny black guy with his hair real tight against his skull and a bit of a moustache. He's wearing jeans that've been factory faded down the front of the legs and an olive-green Kappa jacket, the hood sort of draped round his head, and Mossy recognizes him from the counselling session – he was sitting in the corner. But the main thing Mossy notices is the way he walks: like he's oiled. Like he wasn't born here on the dry Bristol streets, but in a better place. Like he's used to walking the bush day after day after day.

  'You looking for something?' he goes. 'You looking for something?'

  Mossy stops. 'Yeah,' he goes, 'but I'm skint.'

  And what's weird is that instead of the whack to the head he expects the skinny guy looks Mossy in the eyes and says, 'No worries about the money. No worries. I know someone who can help you.'

  And that, of course, is how it all starts.

  4

  13 May

  The late sun had come out from behind the clouds, red and a bit swollen, but in the Station restaurant the table lights were already on. The place was filling up, people coming in, taking off coats, ordering drinks. It was too cool to sit outside and the deck was deserted, so Caffery went out to make his phone calls. There was the super to push a bit, talk him into taking seriously what the dive unit and the CSM were saying, assign a level to the case before the post-mortem – because there was going to be a post-mortem for the hand, all on its own – and there were the two DSs over at Kingswood to move around a bit. They'd been given to him to work on an armed-robbery case so now he threw in a little extra: hospital casualty and mortuary duty. Any male corpses turned up missing a right hand?

  When he'd rattled a couple of Bristol's cages he put his phone into his pocket and went to the point on the deck where he could see round the police screens to the dive crew readying themselves on the deck of the neighbouring restaurant. The Moat, it was called. He liked that – the Moat – as if it was something medieval and not just a spivved-up boathouse with a bit of fake taxidermy on the walls. Someone had talked the manager into not opening for the evening, and the team had dumped their gear on the deck. It lay around in pools of water. Picking her way among it, bending to hook up a dive mask, stopping to talk to her surface attendant and check the harness, was Sergeant Marley.

  He leaned on the balustrade, rolled a ciggy – a habit he still hadn't been able to break, in spite of the way the government sat on his head about it whenever he switched on the TV – and lit it, watching her carefully. 'Flea' – stupid nickname, except that he sort of understood where it had come from. Even in the force-issue dry suit she had something kind of kinetic about her, something in her face that suggested her thoughts didn't stay still for long. He hated the way he'd noticed these things about her. He hated the way, when he'd gone into the staff room and she'd been sitting there with her dry suit crumpled down and her thin brown arms bare, and her wayward stack of blonde hair all tough as if she'd washed it in sea water, he hated the way he'd wanted to leave, because suddenly all he could feel was his body. The way it made contact with his clothes, the way his trousers scratched against his thighs, the brush of his waistband against his stomach and the places his shirt touched his neck. He had to stop himself. That was for someone else. Another person in a different place, a long time ago.

  ' '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 almost 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.