Ritual

15

Now that the sun was going down it was getting cold and the Walking Man had stopped walking. He'd squeezed through a hedge on the roadside on the tiny B route in Somerset, and was preparing his camp for the night in the field on the other side, making a pile of the paper scraps he'd gathered from the roadside that day. At half past eight Jack Caffery pulled up his car opposite, his headlights on.

At first he didn't get out, just switched off the engine and watched. This was someone he'd been thinking about for months. It was bizarre to be here at last.

The Walking Man was used to drivers and their ways and paid no attention. When he turned to gather more wood for the fire Caffery caught sight of his face. Here, he thought, is a man who was born at the bottom of a firepit. He was soot-covered from head to toe: the thick socks he wore over his walking boots, tied in place with a piece of cloth at each calf, were blackened and the three-quarter length jacket he wore, tied with washing-line round his waist, was so grimy you wouldn't know what colour it had once been. He was in his late forties — Caffery knew this from his Criminal Records Bureau entry — but to look at him now you'd never have been able to guess his age. His hair hung past his shoulders and a black beard rambled from just below his eyes to his chest, covering him like a cowl.

Caffery dragged his coat from the back seat and got out of the car. It was one of those deserted Somerset lanes so narrow the trees link overhead and turn themselves into a tunnel: the only light was a little evening sun coming from the gap in the hedgerow that opened on to the Walking Man's field. Caffery shut the car door, buttoned the coat and crossed the lane, pushing himself through the dead remains of a hawthorn bush, getting his old trousers torn, scraping his right sleeve.

In the field he pulled a beanie from his pocket and pulled it down over his ears. It was freezing now it was evening; you'd think it was winter again. He stood on the hard, ploughed ground and waited. The Walking Man continued what he was doing, fishing out a filthy cigarette lighter and putting it to the bottom of the pile of twigs. It flared almost instantaneously, years of firebuilding practice. Flames bit and crackled inside the sticks, casting shadows across the twilit earth.

Caffery came a few steps closer. 'You're the Walking Man.'

He didn't look up. He threw a log on the fire and gathered another two in his gloved hands.

'I said, you're the Walking Man. Aren't you?'

'It's not what I was christened. Not what my mother called me.'

Caffery folded his arms. The Walking Man's voice was educated, sort of polite, but he didn't seem to care who he was speaking to or what they thought. It was as if he'd known Caffery was coming and wasn't bothered whether they talked or not. He dropped the logs on to the fire and watched them for a few moments. Then, satisfied it was going to catch properly, he forced two sticks into the ground next to it, unwrapped the bedroll from his back and draped it over them — spreading it out to warm. His clothing steamed, his breath hung white in the darkening air.

'I've been looking for you for a long time,' Caffery said, after a while.

'And how did you find me?' His voice was light, almost amused. 'I'm not an easy man to find. I move. I walk. That's what I do.'

'And what I do is find people. I'm the police.'

The Walking Man stopped what he was doing and, for the first time, looked up. His eyes were dark-lashed and blue and Caffery had a weird moment of recognition: the same eyes. He and the Walking Man had exactly the same eyes. As if somewhere back down the line they'd shared a relative. Someone as far back as Donegal, maybe.

'I don't like the police.' The Walking Man squinted a little, studying Caffery. He took his time, looking at the beanie, the rough donkey jacket, the Dr Martens. Maybe he was thinking Caffery didn't look like a copper. Or maybe he'd noticed the eyes thing too.

'So,' he said, after a while, 'my old friends. The police. They know where I am, do they?'

'They have an idea. A general idea. You don't stray much out of Somerset and Wiltshire.'

The Walking Man laughed. 'Do they think I didn't spend long enough inside? Or that I'm going to do it again? That I'm going to hurt someone else?'

'Sightings of you get called in. From the public, from people who don't know who you are, maybe see you sleeping rough and think you're ill.'

'Or a danger to them?'

'We don't throw anything away in this job. You're somewhere on an intelligence file.'

'Intelligence,' the Walking Man said to himself, as if it was the wrong word to use for the police.

He turned his back on Caffery to organize his dinner. 'In-tell-igence.'

With the bottle-opener hanging on a tape round his neck, he made holes in the lids of four cans and placed each in the centre of the fire. Then he sat down, moving slowly for the bulk of his clothes, and pulled at the pieces of cloth wrapped round his feet. He removed his boots carefully, taking each lace with caution, and placed them on the ground next to his bedroll. Then he took off his socks, three pairs, and inspected his feet. Caffery saw that in the places his own feet were calloused and red, the Walking Man's were black — as if his body was exuding a kind of protective tar. He used the cloth to rub and dry them, then put on two pairs of dry socks and what looked like sheepskin slippers, which he bound at the ankles with the cloth. After that he took care of his boots: running his hands inside each one, tapping them together at the heels, rubbing a thin line of Vaseline from a tiny pot inside each and setting them near the fire to dry. The Walking Man spent every waking hour of every day walking and his boots needed all the attention he could give them.

'I've come a long way to see you.'

'Have you now?'

'It's taken me a long time to get here.'

'Well, it's taken me a lifetime to get where I am.'

'I know.' Caffery shifted his weight. It was cold out here, really bitter. 'I'm here because I want you to tell me things. I want you to talk about what you did.'

The Walking Man laughed again, mild and polite, as if he had told him a gentle joke. 'And where,' he said, 'does it say I talk for nothing? Hmm? Is there a notice on my back says I'm ready to talk to anybody?' He was still laughing. 'You're not the boss of me. Po-lice-man.'

Caffery unzipped the donkey jacket and pulled out a litre of Scotch from inside his sweater. He held it out. 'Brought you something.'

The Walking Man stared at it, then at Caffery's face. After a few moments he came over and took the bottle, turning it round and round in his hands. Close up his fingernails were raised and yellow, as if they had something bad brewing under them and might fall off at any time. He smelled of firelighters and smoke.

'In nineteen eighty,' he said thoughtfully, looking at the whisky label, with its gold and white picture of a tea clipper, 'an average house in Bristol was worth twenty grand. Did you know that?'

Caffery was never put off track when someone changed direction without warning. It was part of being a cop. 'I didn't. I could maybe hazard a guess about what it was like in London. But not out here. This is new territory to me.'

'Well, now you're in on the secret. Twenty grand. Now, my parents, see, were doctors — both dead now, of course — and they had one of the biggest houses in Clifton. They paid sixty K for it in nineteen eighty and it came straight to me when they died. Course, I couldn't use it because I was in a high-security wing at Long Lartin until-' He made a sound in the back of his throat and rolled his dark blue eyes. 'But you already know that, don't you?'

'I've seen the file.'

'The executors paid off the tax and lodged the house with a management company. They banked the rent for the last ten years of my sentence. It was a beauty of a house — even I could see that. It had six bedrooms and a coach-house, one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in Bristol, so said the estate agents. When I came out of the nick last year I sold it. What do you think they gave me?'

'I just sold a house in London. It wasn't much but my parents gave fifteen for it in the seventies and I got back more than three fifty. I don't know? Five hundred?'

'Try four times that. Almost two million. Every month I get more than eight grand interest paid into my account. Do they have that on my intelligence file?' He threw the bottle into the air, let it spin round, light moving against the navy blue sky, and caught it with a neat smile.

'Here,' he said, jamming it into Caffery's chest. 'I drink cider. But thanks anyway.'

Flea stayed with Tig until eight. They got fish and chips from the only shop in Bristol that still wrapped it in newspapers. They took it back to his flat, shared a bottle of wine and talked, and all the time she kept prodding herself to ask him about the text — about what he'd wanted to talk about. But the idea kept slipping away and when she did remember, when she was getting up to leave at the end of the evening, he waved it aside. No, he said, it was nothing. Just missed seeing you, that's all.

She buttoned her coat, found her keys and kissed Tig's cheek — he always froze when she came near him, as if he'd gone into spasm, his arms out at his sides as if he'd been petrified, but she did it anyway. She was turning away, half smiling to herself at the way she could immobilize him with embarrassment, when she saw his mother standing in the doorway. She was dressed in a pink quilted housecoat and her long grey hair was loose round her shoulders. She looked older than fifty, as if only half of her was actually in the world, the rest somewhere else. A skeleton in a nightgown.

'Mum,' Tig said. 'Mum. Go back to bed. It's late.'

But she held on to the doorframe, her face confused, looking from one of them to the other, her mouth opening and closing as if she was trying to speak. Tig got up and took her arm.

'Oh, Tommy,' she muttered. 'Please. Tell them to go away, will you, love? Tell them to leave me alone.'

'Come on, Mum, you're dreaming again. Back to bed.'

'Tell them to leave me alone — the blacks.'

'Mum, please.' Tig put his arm round her and tried to coax her back down the corridor. 'Come on, darling, back to bed.'

But she resisted. She clung to the doorframe, and turned her head to Flea, as if she might help. All the veins under her yellow skin were standing out blue and sick-looking. 'Oh, dearie,' she whispered. 'Oh, my love, I'm in so much trouble.'

'Mrs Baines, do you remember me? I'm Flea. I met you before. Remember?'

'Ask them, dear, will you? Ask them to leave me alone with their bang-bang music and their smells. Tell them to stop running up and down my corridor and putting their faces through my walls.'

'Don't worry, Mrs Baines.' Flea stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. It was cold and as fragile as a matchstick. 'I'm sure Tommy's got it all organized.'

Mrs Baines blinked at her. Then she began to cry. It was a thin, confused sound, no energy in it. She reached out for Tig. 'Tommy, stop the little one putting his face through my wall again.'

'Mum. It's a television programme. You've watched too much television.'

'I know it's a television programme, Tommy. I know. Have you got that butter knife?' She twisted away from him, peering blearily round the kitchen. 'Where's the butter knife? Your dad's butter knife with the bone handle? Give it to me so I can defend myself.'

Tig glanced despairingly at Flea and she knew he was asking her to help him through this. But all she could do was wrinkle her face sympathetically. Maybe she was kidding herself that because of Thom she could understand what Tig went through with his mum. But this was much worse than having a brother who was out of work and depressed. What Tig dealt with daily was beyond her. And, somehow, he still managed not to use.

'Come on, Mum, I'll get you back to bed. Then I'll bring you some hot milk. You'd like that, wouldn't you?'

'What about the butter knife?'

'I'll bring that too. As soon as you're in bed I'll bring it. I promise.'

'And you'll stop them looking at me? When I'm in my bed?'

'I will. I promise. I'll switch the TV off.'

And he eased her away through the door, his hands on her shoulder-blades, two beaten people, moving slowly down the crowded hallway, leaving Flea alone to stare blankly at the kitchen door swinging on its hinges, thinking that whatever your relationship with your parents somewhere along the line there was always pain.

It was turning out that the Walking Man wasn't like everyone thought. Apart from the cider and the money — Caffery was sure no one knew about the money — there was more. For one thing he didn't stop in the place he found himself when the sun went down. It was more planned than that. He had pit-stops all over the West Country, little hidey-holes just off the road where he knew he wouldn't be bothered. He left things hidden there, under rocks, under cattle troughs, tucked into crumbling walls. On this pit-stop he had tins, a pile of foam-rubber mats and four jars of scrumpy buried in the loose earth next to the hedgerow.

'Should always drink the alcohol produced by the land you're standing on.' He uncorked the glass jar with his teeth. 'You go to Cuba, you drink rum. You go to Mexico, you drink tequila. Never get a hangover if you do that. Generations of wisdom've gone in to making these drinks. Generations learning how a body rubs up against the climate and the soil and the water.'

Caffery unscrewed the bottle of Scotch and tipped the contents on to the frozen earth. He leaned forward and held it out to the Walking Man, who carefully filled it with cloudy scrumpy, holding the glass mason jar to the bottle neck.

'And in Somerset you drink apples. Cider.'

The fire was blazing well now, throwing its light into the faces of the two men. They sat on the corrugated squares of foam and watched the night fall. As the last of the daylight faded, the glow of the lights of Bristol came on to the north-west, misty and distant under a grey sky like a fabled living city, as if dragons lived there, not students and drugs-dealers and people gone bad enough to hack off someone's hands and bury them under a restaurant.

Caffery sat back and put the bottle to his lips. The scrumpy was cold, but it brought such a hit of autumn and childhood apple orchards that he almost drank it all at once, just to stay in that memory and not think about buried hands.

'Farmer I get that from,' said the Walking Man, 'until nineteen ninety he was still putting a carcass into the vat. A pig or a chicken. Said it sweetened the mixture and since the inspectors stopped him the scrumpy's not a shadow of what it used to be.'

Caffery drank some more, straight down, not caring about the car parked on the lane and whether he'd need to drive home. This was how farmers and workers had lived for years and there was something comforting about that. Now, with the cider in his mouth and the honest coldness of a ploughed field on his backside, he let the weirdness of the day fall away from him, let himself stop worrying about some poor bastard with no hands, dead or dying. He wiped his mouth and pulled up his knees, rested his elbows on them and leaned forward.

'What do I have to give you?' he said. 'I can't give you money and I can't see what you need.'

The Walking Man gave a wry smile. 'I need you to give me two things.'

'Two?'

'The first is I need you to tell me who it is who's come here out of nowhere, off the road like a ghost, asking me to turn my past over to him.'

'I'm Jack.' He held out his hand, straight in front of him, waiting for him to shake it.

The Walking Man didn't raise his own. 'Jack? And there's another name comes along with that one? A second name?'

'Caffery.' He lowered his hand and put it on the ground next to him, half embarrassed by it. 'Jack Caffery.'

'Jack Caffery.' The Walking Man laughed a little. 'Jack Caffery, Policeman.'

He stoked the fire and moved the cans expertly around in the bottom. A thin line of steam came from two and these he set aside in the embers. The sun had gone now and the white puffs of old man's beard caught in the top branches had taken on a blue haze, like tiny night-time clouds.

'London, then? Is that where you live?'

'No. I live here. In the Mendips.'

'But you're a London boy. I can tell it from looking at you even before you open that policeman's mouth of yours.'

'Family's Liverpool, Donegal before that — but me, yes, I'm London. And now I'm here. I got a transfer two months ago.'

'To the west?'

'Because I wanted to talk to you.'

'You could've just got an off-peak supersaver. Spent the day with me. Gone back to the Smoke where life is so much better, eh?'

Caffery gave a dry laugh.

'But that's not it,' said the Walking Man. 'Is it? There's more than just wanting to see me.'

'There's always more.'

'There's a woman?' A smile twitched under his beard. 'Jack Caffery, Policeman, don't smokescreen me. There's always a woman.'

'Was. There was a woman. Yes.'

The Walking Man watched his face, waited for him to speak. Caffery sighed. 'She wanted children. The harder she asked for it the more I couldn't. Until we get ourselves into this pressure-cooker of a life, and before we know what's happening…' He clapped his hands, sending out a puff of air that made the flames waver. 'Hey,' he said, dropping his hands and smiling. 'I suppose I didn't love her enough. But whatever happened I couldn't do it. I just couldn't have a child. Not after what I've seen happen. To children.'

There was a silence. The lights of a plane from Bristol airport rose up from the horizon and glinted, cold and silent, and both men looked at it, both maybe pretending not to be thinking about that word, 'children', and the different things it meant to them. When Rebecca had talked about having children she referred to the C-word, because she knew, for Caffery, it was one of the most dangerous words she could utter. She said that without a child the energy he was putting into life was wasted — going into a dead hole. When he asked her what that meant she'd said: 'The energy you put into finding out what happened to Ewan — the same energy you put into the job — means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It goes nowhere and creates nothing.' Which was funny, because he'd never thought of his job and finding an answer as wasted energy. But whenever he thought of a child, a family, the only thing he could imagine was something loose and ethereal, something you could lose in a second. Like trying to gather mist with your bare hands.

After a while the Walking Man got painfully to his feet. He pulled tin plates from the store under the hedgerow and brought them back to the fire. He used a stick to roll the tins out, squeezing one between his feet to hold it still while he cut into the lid with a Swiss Army knife. 'We're going to eat in a minute.' Sweat appeared on his forehead. It ran through the grime and into his beard. 'We'll eat. And then we'll talk some more.'

Caffery held the bottle between both hands and looked up at him. There was only ten years between them but, for a reason that probably had something to do with the scrumpy, this felt as natural and reassuring as looking up at a father. More, maybe. The Walking Man put food on the plates and they ate: steak pudding, little potatoes and some herbs the Walking Man had produced from a pocket. Caffery didn't know why it should be — maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the wake-up call of the scrumpy — but that meat and vegetable from burned tins tasted like the only meal he'd remember when he died. He wiped the plate clean with his fingers and licked them. The Walking Man had finished his meal and was watching him. 'Well, Jack Caffery,' he said, 'you left one woman behind, and what about now? There's no woman here? With you?'

Caffery smiled. 'No. No woman.'

'What do you do, then? For a woman?'

Caffery put the plate down and reached inside his jacket for his tobacco. A habit he hadn't broken, even after all these years. He took his time rolling the cigarette. He couldn't help the way when he heard the word 'woman' the first picture he got was of Flea on the harbour that morning, dirty-blonde hair and her arms tanned under the force's navy T-shirt. When he licked the paper he didn't raise his eyes to the Walking Man. He kept them on the lights of Bristol.

'Prostitutes,' he said. 'I go to prostitutes. Over there. In Bristol.'

'Prostitutes? Or a prostitute?'

'More than one. I hardly ever go to the same one twice.'

'How often?'

'Not often enough.'

'How often's not often enough?'

He lit the cigarette, took a couple of draws, thinking about the bodies and the faces and the streetlights. He thought about the cold void in his chest he must be imagining women like Keelie could close. 'Once a week. Why? What do you do for a woman?'

The Walking Man showed his teeth a little, like bone, and the red edge of his tongue. 'That's over. With me that's been over since it happened. Belongs to another life. Don't miss it when you think of it being something other people do in another life.' He got to his feet and collected the plates, wiped them with a cloth and stacked them next to the ditch. He corked the cider, pushing the jar back under the hedgerow. Then he pulled out a long roll of rubber matting and tossed it into a ditch. 'It's time for me to sleep.'

'The second thing. You haven't told me the second thing you want from me.'

'In the spring I go to sleep an hour after dark,' said the Walking Man, as if he hadn't heard. 'Always have done, ever since they let me out of Long Lartin. You can stay if you want, but you don't want to sleep out here under the stars. For one thing it's cold. And for another…' He shovelled his clothing into the ditch, arranging it on the mat so he'd sleep on it and give it some of his heat for the morning. He took the sleeping-bag from where it hung next to the fire, rolled it up quickly to conserve the heat it had soaked in and laid it on top of the clothes. 'For another you won't want to sleep out in the open with me. I mean…' He clicked his tongue up behind his teeth as if he had something tasty there. 'I mean, how do you know what you'll look like when you wake up?'

Caffery stood. 'There were two things. I've done one — what's the other?'

The Walking Man came a little closer, and this time Caffery saw something infirm about him. Like a limp. Or a hesitation. 'There is one more thing you can do, Jack Caffery. And after that we can talk.'

'Name it.'

'The Snowbunting and the Remembrance. That's my price. A clutch of Snowbuntings and Remembrances.'

'Snowbunting? It's a bird?'

'No. Not a bird. It's a flower. A crocus. A little white spring flower.'

'Where do I get a crocus at this time of year?'

'You get the bulbs so I can plant them. But when you bring them you come to listen to me — you don't come with a lecture in your mouth, or an idea in your head of converting me and making me a productive member of society. I am who I am and you must not try to make me believe in redemption. Understand?'

'I understand. No redemption.'

'Good. The Remembrance is not so popular now, not like it used to be. Out of fashion and not easy to find. But…' He straightened and put his hand on Caffery's chest, holding it there as his hand rose and fell with Caffery's breathing. As if he was testing his heart. 'But you'll find them. You'll find my crocuses. I know you will.'