by Mo Hayder
There was a short silence. Caffery was remembering the physical sensation he'd got around Tig, the one that had made him itch to thump him. It was coming back to him now.
'OK,' he said, ignoring the kitted vest and reaching for the empty one. 'Let's not jump to conclusions. Like you said, just because someone's run into his flat doesn't mean anything. Let's check it out before we jump. OK?'
When they both had their vests on Flea pushed her hair off her face, stood up straight and stiff and knocked loudly on the door.
There was silence. She stood on tiptoe and tried to peer through the little glazed section. 'Tig?' she yelled, banging hard on the wood with the flat of her hand. 'Tig! Are you in there? It's me.'
From the other side of the door came the sound of whispers, of people moving around quickly. A door slammed.
'Tig? Just a quick word.'
More noise. A long silence. Then another door opening and suddenly, on the other side a hand pulled back the curtain. There was a shuffling noise, then a face appeared at the grimy glass.
'Mrs Baines.' Flea put her hand on the glass. 'It's me. Are you all right? Can I come in?'
The woman stared as if she didn't recognize her.
'It's me. Can I come in?'
There was a sound of latches being unfastened, then a frail woman in a tattered housecoat opened the door. 'I don't know where he is, lovey. He's off somewhere with the blacks again.'
Caffery peered into the dingy hallway. Inside, the flat was a mess – piles of newspapers everywhere, all sorted out and organized into separate carrier-bags. Written in felt-tip above each pile were dates: 1999–2006. There was a smell of tomato soup and something else – something he couldn't put his finger on. All the doors leading from the hallway were closed.
Tightening the side fastening on the body armour, he stepped inside. 'You on your own, my love?'
'Yes, yes. Always left on me own.'
Caffery opened a door. A kitchen, small and cluttered with washing-up in the sink. No one in it. 'It's just we know there are some people living here.'
'Do you, dear?' She seemed unconcerned as Flea went into the living room, checking behind the sofa, the curtains. 'Well, you'll have to ask my son about that.'
Caffery opened another door and then another. 'Is he here?'
'Oh, no. Not properly here. Not in the way you'd think.'
'What does that mean?'
She gave a toothless grin. 'Lord knows. I'm a bit doo-lally. That's what they keep telling me – that I'm not all there.' She tapped her head. 'Not what I used to be.'
'Look, Mrs Baines, is your son here or not?'
'Oh, no. Of course he ain't.'
Caffery looked at the darting eyes, at the soiled quilted housecoat and the thinning hair. He had a mother somewhere; as far as he knew she was still alive. She'd given up on him when Ewan had gone missing, and thirty years later he'd even stopped wondering where she was.
'Got your scanner on, have you?' Flea asked.
'Me scanner? Oh, no, gone orf it – watching the telly now.'
'All right if I have a look at it?' Caffery said.
She waved her hand, as if she was dismissing them. 'Oh, do what you want. See if I care.'
He went into her bedroom, with its unmade bed, its closed curtains, four or five mugs crammed on the bedside table. It was small and it didn't take him long to work out there was no one in it. He looked at the scanner. Like she said, it was switched off. There was a cold feeling in the room, as if stale air was being pumped in from somewhere. He went back into the hallway and found her scowling at him, holding up a finger as if she was warning him. 'You'll have to get the police in anyway,' she said. 'To stop what he's up to.' She smiled. 'That's all I'm saying.'
Caffery glanced at Flea. She was standing just inside the living-room door, frowning at Mrs Baines. 'What does that mean, Mrs Baines? Stop what he's up to?'
'What I said. That the police'll need to come to sort it out, I shouldn't wonder. With him letting the blacks run over the place all the time and what they get up to together. But don't worry about me. Don't you worry about me.' She tapped the side of her head and limped back inside her bedroom, closing the door firmly. There was a pause, then the sound of the television. Flea turned to the door, as if to follow her, then seemed to change her mind. Instead she turned to the one door they hadn't tried.
'His room,' she muttered. 'I've never been in there.'
'Still got that knife in your knickers?' Caffery asked.
'You saw it?'
He didn't answer. He pressed his back against the wall and lifted his foot, putting just enough pressure on the latch to open it. It swung wide and they found themselves looking into a darkened box room, a tatty blue bedspread hung over the window. There was a wardrobe against the far wall, a computer desk in the corner, and a teenager's metal bunk bed taking up most of the space. Keeping his back to the wall Caffery reached inside and clicked on a light.
'Empty?'
She darted her head in, then out again, nodding. 'Empty.'
He swivelled through the doorway and into the room, went to the wardrobe and opened it. There was a line of clothes hanging up; no one was inside it. Caffery glanced under the bed and pulled back the duvet. The window was closed. No one had come through here. It was as if the skinny guy in the jacket had vanished into thin air.
He was trying to work out what he'd missed in the flat when he realized Flea wasn't moving. She was still standing in the doorway, staring at the walls. He followed her eyeline and saw why she was being so quiet.
The walls were papered in hardcore gay S&M. One bore posters from Deviant, the S&M club in Old Market, boasting its equipment of '2 slings, 2 crosses, 2 doggy tables . . .' Another wall showed a series of pictures of a man in a see-through plastic tunic, his penis in a leather ring, blood pouring from the wounds on his body and congealing under the plastic like packed meat. In the first two pictures he was being forced to lick the feet of a fully dressed businessman. In the last he was being held face down in a toilet.
'Whoa.' Caffery whistled. 'Heavy-duty shit.'
He went to the last wall, which was covered with a single blown-up photo, real or mocked-up, it was difficult to tell. It showed a shaven-headed man in a leather apron biting off the nipple of a man wearing only black Dr Martens and a white studded dog collar. Stapled to it at waist height were ten photographic A4s. Caffery bent down to them and saw something that would convict Baines in a second. The photographs showed everything that had happened in the North West Tower on the Hopewell estate. They showed a small black guy in a tribal outfit, a red tabard, his hair beaded and white paint smeared on his cheeks. It was the guy in the jacket, pictured in different poses: one showed him performing a ritual dance wearing the robes of a witch doctor, baring his teeth at the camera lens, but the others showed him standing next to a half-naked man on a sofa – Caffery guessed it was Ian Mallows – and inserting a cannula into his arm, letting the blood drain off into a large plastic jug. And the next one – Caffery had to pinch his nose to stop stomach acid coming into the back of his throat – showed the witch doctor crouched next to a body, holding a knife to the raw, bloodied stumps where hands had once been.
He swallowed hard and steeled himself to look closely at this picture. There were things to avoid: Mallows's pale body – he was assuming it was Mallows – the blood that had fountained up the whitened arms, the eyes rolled back. He had to concentrate to block these things because something else was more wrong than all of the obvious wrong. There was only one unreal thing in the photograph, and that was the face of the witch doctor.
He squinted at those eyes and saw something he recognized: a blankness, a lie. There was something about the posture – the knife held up for the camera, the face too posed – that made him think of holiday snaps. It came to him quite fast: It's not you who did the cutting, is it? You're just the act. He didn't have to form the question, So if not you then who?, because he knew the answer. He knew t
he person who had done the cutting.
Shit, he thought. There's no giving you the benefit of the doubt, Tig, mate. You're never going to be redeemed. You steered me wrong, sending me to TIDARA. And then, in a flash, he understood why.
'Baines,' he said. Flea was standing behind him, her face white. 'Did he know Kaiser? Through you?'
'I'm sorry?'
'I said, did Baines know Kaiser.'
'No,' she said faintly. 'No – I mean—' She glanced at him. 'Yes – he knew of him.'
'About him and ibogaine?'
Her tongue darted out and she licked her lips. 'Probably. Why?'
He sighed. 'Nothing. Ever get the feeling you've been led by the bollocks?'
Flea came up beside him, still staring at the photos. She held up her hand towards them, her hand hovering, not quite touching them, copper's instinct not to touch, but he knew she wanted to. 'Christ,' she breathed. 'Who is he?'
'I don't know, but probably our friend in the jacket. And if I had to lay bets on it I'd say that's Mallows on the sofa.'
'Oh, fuck,' she muttered thickly. 'It's true, then.' She sat down at the little computer table, propping her face in her hands.
He turned away from the photographs, wanting to touch her, to rest his hand on her hair, knowing that he couldn't. 'Tell me.'
'Nothing,' she said. 'Except . . .'
'Yeah?'
'Except that when I went to see Mabuza I was so sure he knew I was job.'
'How come?'
Something guarded crossed her eyes. 'Nothing – just I had a feeling he'd been warned. The place was covered with crucifixes, as if he was trying to show he ran a good Christian household. And . . .'
'And?' Caffery said, eyes on the photographs.
'He's gay,' she said quietly. 'Tig. Very gay.'
'Gay as nails,' he said, 'by the looks of things. Didn't you know?'
'Yes, I knew,' she said, in a monotone. 'I always knew. He let me doubt it, but now I think he was trying to open me up, get me to feed him information about the case.'
'Which he'd feed back to Mabuza. I knew someone was emceeing the fucking thing, just didn't think it'd be some white gay boy.'
Flea was still staring at the walls. 'But that's Tig for you – most of his clients are black, Asian. He's street, you know. He's one of them. For a while Atrium even liked him for a snout.'
Caffery examined the small bookshelf above Flea's head. Lined up was a row of MPF diskettes. One had the word 'Magic' scrawled across it in crude writing. The next two had the name 'Mabuza' printed in Magic Marker.
Caffery had his hands on the little MPF diskette when something stopped him. It made him feel cold and still all at once. It made him turn to Flea. They didn't need to speak – both knew what the other was thinking. They were thinking that they had just heard what sounded like someone, quite nearby, pushing over a large piece of furniture.
'Where was it from?' Caffery whispered. He stood above her, hand out, the dust and sweat from the chase through the streets engrained on the underside of his shirt sleeve. 'Where did it come from?'
'I dunno,' Flea murmured. It wasn't coming from the flat . . . not exactly. It was coming from the back of the room where another flat would be.
She turned very slowly and looked at the bed, the cupboard. She was picturing Tig's mum last week, muttering to herself in the kitchen. Stop the blacks coming through the walls. Stop them putting their faces through the walls.
'The walls,' she whispered.
'The walls?'
'Check them.'
He gave her a strange look, but went to the wall anyway, sweeping his hands along it, feeling for anomalies, his expression saying he was humouring her. He pulled the bedspread away from the window, searching for an airbrick maybe, or a hole he hadn't noticed, while Flea got down on the dirty, gritty carpet to scan the wall under the bed. Nothing. It was only when Caffery went back to the wardrobe and opened it, kicking aside the junk on the floor, that she saw him react. She saw him half turn away, then stop.
'What?' She got up, came to stand next to him and saw what he was looking at. The back of the wardrobe wasn't plastered. A piece of plywood was propped upright behind the hanging clothes. He dropped to a squat and looped his fingers behind it, then pulled it away from the wall, setting loose a cloud of plaster dust. Immediately they could smell mould and ammonia.
'OK,' he muttered, dusting off his hands. 'I think we've found him.'
Behind the plasterboard a hole about five feet tall and three wide had been knocked into the wall. Plaster dust covered the floor, and a piece of ragged wallpaper hung in shreds. They bent their heads and peered through into a small corridor, with ruined walls, electric leads hanging from the ceiling. Light filtered from an opening to their left, blocked by a padlocked iron gate. Somewhere inside water dripped. Beyond the gate they could see the beginnings of another room. Only the floor was visible, threadbare bits of carpet glued to the flaking underlay, a newspaper lying folded with the sports page face up. But in front of them the corridor extended into darkness.
Caffery crawled through the opening, giving the gate to the left an experimental push with his foot. He checked the padlock – fastened – dropped it and turned the other way, into the darkness. 'That's what he's done, the little shit. Dug his way into another flat.'
'Jesus.' Flea shivered. The air was damp, stagnant, like a long-closed cave and now, as she imagined a rats' nest of corridors, a maze, her heart wouldn't stop thumping. Quickly she ran her hands along the walls at shoulder height, sweeping for a light switch. Nothing. Just the daylight from the left and ahead the darkness. 'He must have—'
A shuffling noise was coming from the dark ahead. She leaned forward, trying to see into the room, her eyes pricking with fear. She could see a red light flashing on and off in there – not big, no more than a pinpoint – the size of a human iris. Something electronic, maybe. The sound came again and beads of sweat broke out in her armpits.
'Fuck it,' she muttered, stepping back into the bedroom, fumbling for her airwaves radio. She hit the emergency button and blocked out all other traffic. 'Bravo Control, bravo Control,' she hissed. 'Location is Hopewell estate, North West Tower, status zero, urgent assistance required. Suggest any attending units bring support unit bags and method-of-entry tools. And, uh . . .' She squinted down the corridor, which seemed to stretch right into the centre of the building. It made her blood run cold to think of it – Tig burrowing into the walls of his flat like a fucking termite. 'Yeah, tell them to contain the building from all sides. It's Sitexed so bring a Scott pack too.'
She signed off and turned to Caffery, who was standing in the opening, his back to the wall. Beyond him the red light was flashing on and off, illuminating the edge of his face. He was shaking his head.
'What is it?' she mouthed.
'You're going to wait for them?' he whispered.
'Yes.' She shifted the vest so that it rested on her pelvic bones and her breasts were more comfortable. 'Risk assessment,' she murmured. 'I've done one, and that's my decision.'
'And how far into the fucking building do you think he's gone?'
She knew what Caffery was saying. She knew where he was going with this. 'I don't care how far he's gone.'
'But you care if he's getting out the other fucking side,' he hissed.
'I care about doing my job and about me coming out the other side. It's basic training, one oh one – no light, we don't know what's in there and I'm not putting my life at risk. You might be in a hurry to die, but I'm not.'
With her last sentence the light reflected in Caffery's eyes became a little harder. He opened his mouth to say something, but seemed to change his mind. He looked back down the corridor, then at her, and for a moment she thought he was going in on his own. But he didn't. Instead he took a step back into the room and reached for her. For the second time that day she flinched, as if he was about to hurt her. But he was reaching to unsnap a holder on her body armour, to pull out the grey c
anister of CS gas. Then he put his lips very close to her ear. The hairs across her neck were stirred by his breath. 'Now that,' he whispered, 'is the biggest lie I've ever heard come out of another human being's mouth.'
Flea went very still. She watched him step away from her into the corridor, the eerie on-off, on-off of the red light in the dark room sparking round his outline. She could feel the small muscles in her jaw moving as she pictured Bushman's Hole, remembered letting Thom go down. She thought about the dark water, of what he was thinking when he saw Mum and Dad heading into the blackness, and a sensation like air rushed through her, like something rising up from inside her and cracking. She slammed the mobile into the Velcro fastening on the vest and caught up with Caffery in the corridor, laying a hand on his shoulder.
'Listen,' she hissed, narrowing her eyes, straining to see into the dark room ahead. 'The gas. Only use it if you have to – this place is too enclosed. You use it and we'll all get some of it and then we really will be waiting for the cavalry.' She ran her left hand across the pockets, checking everything was there – the Quikcuffs, the radio. She yanked the knife from inside the back of her trousers and handed it to him. 'They'll be expecting us at head or chest height. So we go in low.'
She pushed past him and dropped to a squat in the doorway, side on. Caffery was close behind her. She heard him drop too, then the in and out of his breath near her neck, but in front there was only silence – the shuffling had stopped. She tried to stretch her eyes into the room, her head automatically reeling off everything she was supposed to think about – the shape of the room, the position of the target, what her objective was – knowing that none of it would make any sense, that here her training counted for nothing.
'You go left, I'll go right. On three.' She unsnapped the ASP – the heavy, neoprene-covered expandable steel tube – and squeezed it, the weight in her hand reassuring. Keep it unracked for now. It was just as effective and wouldn't get in the way at ground height. 'One, two, three.'