Ritual

9

14 May

The morning of the second day of the case, drinking coffee on Bristol harbour and watching the dive team assemble their kit, Jack Caffery was thinking about a direction: he was thinking about west. For a long time it wasn't going to be west for him when he left London, it was going to be east — the direction that for an Englishman means cold winds and invaders. At about the same time that his sense of a connection with Ewan had disappeared he'd been doing a job in Norfolk, and maybe that was why he'd felt pieces of him had got stuck there. For a while after the abrupt ending of his sense of Ewan, he'd looked for a position in East Anglia, monitoring vacancies on the web. But when months had gone by with none coming up, he'd turned his attention to the west where something more interesting was happening.

A prisoner had been released from an open jail.

A man who understood a particular species of violence. The more Caffery thought about it, the more he knew he needed to meet him. Then, almost like an omen, a position came up in the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. The wait for Norfolk was shelved and it was west that Caffery came: to smugglers and apple orchards and Somerset, the land of the summer people.

It was odd how things had worked out because there was something about working in the west he liked: a straightforwardness instead of the freakiness of London where, whatever you did, it all ended up a bit warped. Now, as the sun sparkled off the boats and the restaurant windows and the courting swans in the harbour making heart shapes with their necks, he told himself he was liking the west. Yes, he thought, looking down to where the dive unit had finished loading the boat and Flea was standing in its bow zipping up her dry suit, if it wasn't for some promises he'd made himself, if it wasn't for the bad way he felt inside about women, he could get to like this place.

She was only a couple of feet below him, her hair pinned up wildly round her small tanned face, her feet planted wide to balance as the boat rocked. Now that he looked at her closely he saw her pause, her hand at her collarbone. She wasn't facing the harbour, the part they were going to dive this morning, but the opposite direction, back towards the quay — at the point where the pontoon met the wall a few feet beneath his feet. It was the exact place the waitress had pointed to when she'd described seeing the odd creature coming out of the water.

It was a moment or two before anyone noticed her expression, then PC Dundas, who was about to throttle up the motor, glanced at her and saw that something was wrong. He let go of the tiller. 'Sarge?'

'Yeah — hang on.' She held up a hand. 'Hang on.'

She was staring at the harbour wall, as if she was trying hard to remember something important — something just out of reach. Caffery remembered a snatch of tourist blurb he'd read: the harbour and the Cut had been built by prisoners of the Napoleonic wars and still stood, almost two hundred years later, mossed, slimed and blackened from decades of engine oil and pollution. To him they were unfamiliar and weird, like a dungeon, but Flea must know them back to front so her sudden interest made no sense.

'Sarge?' Dundas said, frowning. 'Sarge? You all right?'

She didn't turn to him. Instead she raised her head to Caffery. 'It was raining yesterday morning,' she said. 'Wasn't it?'

He gathered himself quickly — a bit unprepared for the direct way she was looking at him. He put his elbow on the handrail and leaned over. 'Yeah. Yeah, it was. Why?'

She stared at him a bit more, sort of blankly, as if she was still trying to work an idea out of an awkward corner of her head. Then, a passing boat sent up a swell that rocked the little launch and her concentration was gone. She shook her head and finished zipping the dry suit. She pulled on her harness, then her fins. 'Come on,' she called, signalling Dundas to start the engine. 'Let's do it.'

Caffery watched the boat set off, leaving a foamy trail in the muddy water. Flea was bending over, checking her cylinders, tapping gauges, clipping the lifeline to the harness with a D-ring. He was in a way glad to see her go — she had a way of looking at him as if she knew all his secrets, not just the ordinary ones but the dirty ones too. As if she knew where he'd gone after he left the harbour last night. Now he couldn't tell if the bad taste in his mouth was from the bottle of wine he'd drunk or the memory of what he'd done in the back of his car, parked in the alley next to the dumpsters.

He watched till the boat had gone round the corner, then finished his coffee — the third cup, because whatever happened he couldn't allow a hangover into his day. The fingerprints on the hand hadn't come back. The IDENT1 computer wasn't as bad as the old NAFIS system but it could be slow and overnight it had only pulled up one of the five prints needed for comparison. But the path report was complete and made disturbing reading. The pathologist had recovered some fibres from the hand, purply-blue ones that she'd sent to the lab at HQ, and she'd agreed that the marks on the bones had been made by a saw. She also said that the hand had probably been removed when the victim had still been alive.

All of which had brought the superintendent down a bit on his fury with Caffery. He'd assigned a level to the case and the Major Crime Investigation Unit had sent a staffing quota of a three-man HOLMES team for the incident room at Kingswood, two more DCs, a DS and a civvy investigator — a retired officer — plus a crime-scene manager and a scene liaison officer. It lit Caffery up to have decent manpower — there were another four men due at the quayside by eight a.m., ready to start interviewing anyone who worked in or frequented the area. Today the harbour would be running with police.

He crumpled the coffee cup and was about to head back to the road to meet his team when the sound of the utility craft made him stop. It was heading back towards the pontoon fast, Flea in the bows wearing her dive hood, no mask, staring at the same part of the harbour wall she'd been pulled by five minutes ago. As the boat came nearer and Dundas killed the engine, the stern came round so it lay alongside the wall. She leaned forward and, grabbing the buddleia trunks that grew out of the mossy quayside wall, dragged the boat sideways, stopping every few inches to press her hands against the stone, inspecting it with a frown.

'What's up?' Caffery peered at her head — shiny and dark like that of a small seal. 'Found something?'

'Nope. I've worked something out.'

'What?'

'The witness statement,' she said, breathing hard now. 'Did you read it?'

'Only in outline. They took it at New Bridewell. Why?'

'I got most of it from your super in the briefing. Right from the beginning it bothered me.' She squinted down at the harbour wall. She brushed aside some algae, squinted again and shook her head, dismissing whatever had caught her attention. 'It bothered me that he could see the hand at all. Bothered all of us.'

She stepped her hands further along the wall, digging her nails in. Caffery took a few steps along to keep up with her. 'And it still bothers you?'

'It was nil vis in the water yesterday. I just couldn't square it — how he could have seen the bloody thing.'

Something caught her eye and she stopped again. She swung her legs round so she was sitting on the stern of the boat, fingers digging into one of the mossed old stones of the quayside, her feet wedged against the pontoon so she could push the craft into the wall and get her face close to it. Dundas had found a mooring pin and was holding on to it, steadying the boat. She made a small, satisfied noise and pushed her right hand at the wall. Caffery leaned over as far as he could but all he could see was her head, her shoulders, her face, turned sideways and screwed up in concentration, and her arm disappearing deep into the wall.

'I said, is it bothering you now?'

She nodded. Her eyes had the shortened focus of someone who is working by feel alone. 'Yes. And he said there wasn't…' She pushed her arm a little further in. 'He said there wasn't anyone else on the quayside. Didn't he?'

'Far as I know. Maybe it was floating.'

She glanced up at him. Blue eyes that gave him a jolt because he hadn't noticed before that there was something a bit wild about them. Then she dropped them again and all he could see was the top of her dive hood, and her arm burrowing into the wall.

'A hand on its own doesn't float,' she said. 'It just wouldn't. Even if it had started to decompose…'

She broke off. She pulled her arm out of the hole and looked at what she held in her fist. A lump of congealed black slime with pieces of leaf and stick in it. She rolled backwards a little and dropped the mess on to the pontoon, giving it a cursory examination with a finger, her face tight with the strain of holding herself up.

Then she glanced back at Caffery — that flash of blue light in her eyes again. 'Even if it's decomposed, which this one wasn't, a hand still wouldn't float.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's too heavy, so much bone, not much soft tissue. And even if there was enough gas the skin's broken, so the gases would've escaped. No gases, no floating.' She inserted her hand back into whatever hole she'd found. He could smell it — the foul odour of drains and dark places. This time her arm went in all the way up to the shoulder. Her face was pressed against the wall, squashing her cheek forward. 'Which means he's either lying. Or…'

'Yes?'

'Or it got washed into the water by a current and he happened to see it going down. It was raining yesterday morning. So, for example, it could have come out of a storm drain.' She grimaced as she tried to get a grip on something. With a little grunt she wedged her free hand against the wall and levered herself backwards, pulling her right hand out and delivering the second wet handful of slime on to the pontoon. Then she pulled back, both hands either side of the hole and peered into it. The sleeves of her dry suit were covered with green moss and slime. 'A storm drain. Like this one.'