Ritual

11

14 May

'Don't need to ask what this is about.' The council sub-contractors, three men in bright red jackets marked SITA, were manoeuvring their inflatable raft against the edge of the pontoon, one of them assembling a jetting machine, snapping on the jet head to the orange flexipipe. One was holding his finger under the drain, watching the steady dribble of water on to it while his colleague was testing the jet. 'Only question is, how far up.'

Caffery was on the pontoon, looking down thoughtfully at the handfuls of sludge Flea'd pulled out of the drain. 'You what?'

The contractor was a big red-faced man with a shaved head and three piercings in his right ear. 'He's blocked, isn't he? The drain. See, a trickle like this on a sunny day and it means 'e's blocked somewhere.'

'How far up?'

'Wales?' He laughed. 'Cardiff? Don't worry. When we hit it you'll be the first to know.'

As they inserted the jet head Caffery studied the entrance to the drain and the long green tail of slime under it. Then he peered at the stuff on the pontoon between his feet. It was black, but ever since it had been pulled out he'd been thinking of the fatty white residue that had been clogging up Dennis Nilsen's drains back in the nineteen eighties. Everyone in the Met knew that story — the story of what the drain people had found. Human fat, as it turned out, from the sixteen bodies Nilsen had dismembered in his bedsit, boiled and flushed down the toilet.

'Figured out where the drain comes from yet?' he asked Flea. She had showered in the Station and was dressed in a navy fleece and combats, and now she was kneeling on the pontoon, inspecting the blueprint they'd had biked over from the Environment Agency. He came and crouched next to her, trying not to be conscious of the way the air changed near her, the way the smell of the drains was replaced by baby lotion and toothpaste.

'Where do these things lead?'

'Some of the drains let into the harbour, some into underground rivers — the Frome, or the moat — but just to confuse things some let back into the sewer system.' She gestured downstream to where the Clifton Suspension Bridge stood cold and remote, spanning the dark gorge. The contractors turned on the sluice and dirty water gushed out of the opening, splashing into the harbour, moving the boat round with its force. She raised her voice above the noise. 'The pumping station for the northern interceptor is right over there. Just up under the bridge.'

'The northern what?'

'One of the sewage systems. We've got two in Bristol — one's the southern ring, the other's in the north. We're on the north one here. But that doesn't mean anything because most of the storm-drain system is separate, like in most cities. This one…' She ran a finger along the route shown. It led from the harbour back past the restaurant entrance, terminating about three metres further along, by the road. There was one open drain cover shown at its head. 'This one's not connected underground.' She tapped the map at the head of the drain. 'It only looks it because it's flowing in that direction.'

'We're there,' shouted one of the men on the boat. 'We've found him.' Caffery and Flea looked up. The contractor with the earring was holding the jet hose above his head, both hands on it, eyes narrowed, face turned away from the water that was fountaining out, soaking everything. 'Got him.'

'What've you got?' Caffery came forward, shouting above the sound of the water. 'Do you know what it is?'

'Can't tell,' he yelled back. 'It's a long way up — ten metres at least. We're going to have to have a look inside.'

Caffery watched Dundas assemble the search unit's drain cam: a gyroscopically mounted camera on a wheeled probe. It was attached by a fifty-metre cable to a portable screen zipped inside a yellow waterproofed casing and when the contractors had moved their boat out of the way and the dive team had manoeuvred their launch into position, Flea began carefully to insert the camera head into the hole.

She switched on the remote-control toggle, and the wheeled camera trundled off on its long journey into the drain. There was silence as everyone watched the screen, the only sound the squeak of the cable winding gently off the spool. The camera had two lights mounted on it and the picture was in full colour — an eerie, twisting journey into the earth, brushed by hanging knots of plant roots, passing through the blinding whiteness of sunlight from an overhead grille, water sloshing over the lens. There had been drains in the railway banks at the back of Caffery's house that the police had searched for Ewan's body and Caffery had problems with drains to this day.

'Lookit that,' murmured one of the contractors, studying the inside of the drain. 'Bloody thing's cracked to buggery. Radials everywhere.'

Flea worked slowly, glancing back and forth between the drainage charts, the screen and the entrance to the drain. 'That's five metres,' she said, checking the read-out on the monitor. 'And what? You hit something at ten?'

'Ten and a half.'

They lapsed into silence, the team glued to the screen, expecting at any minute the camera to turn a corner and the screen to be filled with an image.

Maybe everyone was expecting to see something different, but for Caffery it was eyes. All through his childhood he'd lie awake at night, thinking of the railway cutting outside his bedroom window, wondering where Penderecki had buried Ewan. He always pictured Ewan on his back, his face turned upwards, so even now he expected the eyes to come first, looming out of the darkness, the light hardly reflecting off flat, dried-out corneas.

'Nine,' Flea murmured. 'Nine and a half. Ten. Ten and a…'

She stopped the camera. The screen had filled with an image. Everyone crowded round, hardly breathing.

'What's that?' murmured Caffery.

It wasn't the distorted body part everyone had in their heads. It took them a moment or two to see what it was instead: an accumulation of rock, silt, root and soil.

'That's your blockage,' she said.

'Looks like a fall,' said one of the contractors. 'You've had a cave-in there.'

'Can you get past it?'

'Think so.' She was toggling the controls. On screen the camera head lunged into the rock, climbed and fell. 'If I can just…' She made three attempts at it. On the fourth the little remote camera climbed to the top of the fall and trundled down the other side into standing water. The picture got blurry under water, the lights picking up swirls of silt. On it went, Flea stopping it to inspect every anomaly, swivelling the camera head at every crack or bump. After about five minutes it butted up against a blank wall and came to a stop.

'What's that?'

She shook her head. 'The end?' she suggested.

Then, a little surprised, 'There's nothing.' There was a short, disappointed silence. Flea let the camera nose up against the wall, turned it, let it make a final inspection of the fall from the opposite side. But nothing. The length of the drain behind the fall was clear. She switched off the camera, and the image on screen died, dwindling to a point.

'Oh, well,' said Dundas. He put his hand on Flea's back. 'It was about the only half-logical explanation anyone could have come up with.'

'Yeah.' She shrugged. 'I suppose. Even so…' Biting her lip, she spooled in the camera, setting it into reverse mode, lights off.

The sub-contractors began to disband, a little disappointed not to have seen a dead body rammed into a drain, a horror story to tell their mates in the pub. Only Caffery didn't move. He was standing quite still, his thoughts racing, staring at the blank screen. Something was ticking away, something that had to do with direction and intent, and the sudden conviction that whoever was responsible for cutting off the hand had never intended it to end up in the harbour. He turned to the harbour wall, trying to estimate the distance from the opening to the surface. About five feet, he reckoned.

'Hey,' he said to Flea. 'The camera was going up, wasn't it? On an incline?'

'Yes. Because the drain is at a pitch. Why?'

He picked up the chart and studied it. 'How deep does the drain run? Can we follow the path overground?'

She stopped winding in the camera and glanced dubiously at the chart in his hands. 'It depends how accurate that is. S'pose you could put ground-probing radar on it, but that's a trip to HQ for us.'

'Come on, then.' He stepped off the pontoon. 'Let's give the chart a try.'

'But there's nothing in the drain,' she called from behind, putting down the control and coming after him. 'I covered it all. I didn't miss a thing.'

'Didn't say you did, Sergeant. Didn't say you did.'

Caffery bunched the map in his hand, so he could see the dotted line, and headed up the quayside, out through the privacy screens to where one or two people hovered inquisitively next to the unit van, its Underwater Search sign an open invitation to every ghoul in the city.

'Hey,' Flea was saying breathlessly, hurrying to keep pace with him, 'don't worry. I'm not going to cry about being wrong, you know.'

He halted a few feet from the restaurant and she stopped next to him. There was a pause. Then, at exactly the same time, some instinct made them both look down. They were standing at either side of a puddle that stretched round the drain grille between their feet. There was a moment's silence while they considered the puddle, wondered what it meant.

'This was here yesterday,' she said, staring at her feet, at her regulation boots just touching the edge of the water. 'I got my shoes wet in it.'

'Because the drain's blocked. It's not draining away.' Caffery looked at the cobbles that stretched to the stairs leading into the restaurant entrance. If he was reading the chart right, this grille was at the head of the drain. From here it ran back towards the harbour in a straight line. About two metres from where they stood it would have to run under an area cordoned off by timber palings where the dumpsters were. He followed the imaginary line back, going round the palings until he came to the opening.

'What're you doing?'

He held up his hand to quiet her and stepped round the fence into the enclosure. There was a smell here, flies gathering round the piled-up bin-liners bulging with waste from the kitchens. A dozen or so crates of empty beer bottles stood against the steps up to fire doors leading into the kitchen. He pushed away one of the dumpsters and used his foot to move the bin-liners, clearing the ground in the direction of the entrance. At the wall, where the drain must have run briefly under the porch of the building, he stopped, peering down at what was between his feet.

'What're you-' Flea broke off when she saw what he was looking at. The last cobble, the one that should have met the underside of the steps, was missing. Others, surrounding it, had been cut, crudely, maybe with a pickaxe. 'Oh,' she said softly. 'I think I know what you're thinking.'

'Yeah. I reckon we're standing right over the cave-in. Don't you?'