Ritual

19

At the community-centre door in Mangotsfield Caffery was tired. A niggling ache had started in his legs, and while he waited for someone to answer the bell he pushed two ibuprofen into his mouth and dry-swallowed them. He'd have liked a cigarette and to lie down somewhere. Or to be with one of the City Road girls — anywhere except here, waiting to sit through another interview with a reluctant drugs counsellor.

The meeting at HQ that afternoon had turned into a sterile exercise in man management. Now that drugs were in the equation, the steam had gone out of the inquiry. He'd spent the time gazing at the sprinklers and trimmed lawns of Valley Road HQ, half listening to the SIO and half thinking about those forty names, twenty locations and seventeen counselling services waiting to be visited. For a moment his spirits had been raised when he heard from Kingswood that there'd been a message about the purple fibres found in Ian Mallows's fingernails. But it was just a memo to let him know the Chepstow lab had agreed with the Portishead lab that the fibres were from a carpet and wanted to do expensive gas chromatography tests before they gave him any more information.

There was a few moments' silence before someone came to the door. The chief counsellor of the charity, Tommy Baines, wasn't what Caffery had expected on paper. He was in his late twenties, with the faint blue of a laser-treated tattoo on his neck and his hair closely shaved in a way that Caffery read as shorthand for aggression, past and present. There was something wrong with one of his eyes too, something that could have come from a fight. As Caffery flashed his warrant card he thought he saw, or imagined, a beat of anger in Baines's eyes — almost as if Caffery was an old mate who'd promised not to bother him at work but had turned up anyway. It was as if he'd been interrupted, and for a moment Caffery wondered if he'd blundered into something personal. As Baines unlocked the door, showed Caffery inside and locked up, Caffery got the clear idea there was someone else in the building, someone hiding in one of the darkened rooms. A woman maybe? He thought he could smell something. A perfume that might have been familiar. He scanned the corridor they walked up, registering where each door was, where it claimed to lead.

'You can call me Tig,' Baines said, as he took him into the office. 'Name I got in prison. Don't ask why.' He picked up a stack of twelve-step sheets and threw them on to the photocopier, jamming his code in with his thumb, not looking at Caffery as if he wasn't much interested in him — as if he was used to the Bill turning up on his doorstep. 'We're hand to mouth at the moment. Small. No permanent beneficiaries so we're getting by on a donation here and there, and whatever fees we can pick up from the clients. The ones who can afford it, which is about none of them.' He spoke in a measured way, thinking every word through before he let it out of his mouth. 'It's me does everything. I'm the managing trustee, the only counsellor employed, and until we can afford it I'm housing-support officer too. This centre,' he raised a hand to indicate the building, 'is one of our donors. I get six free hours a week here.' He took the sheets from the feeder and put them into a transparent folder. He glanced at the vertical blinds, the industrial blue carpet, the impersonal chipboard desk and filing cabinets. 'Yeah, this is as near as I get to official premises. Apart from this and some relapse counselling for a residential programme over in Keynsham I basically run the charity out of my mum's flat. And she's a fruit, my mum.'

It was getting dark outside, and except for the office the old Victorian school was deserted. Caffery put his hand on a chair. 'Can I sit down?' he said. 'I need to have a few minutes' chat if that's OK. Not in a hurry, are you?'

At the copy machine Tig hesitated. Caffery thought his eyes flicked briefly to the door and he got the impression again that someone else was in the darkened building. Unfinished business. But it didn't go anywhere. Instead Tig gestured to the chair. 'Sure, sure. There's no one else using the place tonight. Sit, mate. I'll get the kettle on.'

Caffery sat and watched him busy around, making tea, wiping out coffee cups with a green paper towel, scouting cupboards for a biscuit tin. While he waited he got out his notebook and the photo of Mossy, putting it face down on the big desk. This kind of interview drove him crazy: he'd never met anyone in drugs counselling who wasn't as closed as an arsehole, who didn't act like the police were asking for arterial blood when they asked to know about clients, and what was their problem? Didn't they get the concept of client confidentiality? The voluntary sector could be a bit easier than the statutories, not as hidebound, but even they didn't pipe out information for free.

'You never get tired of it?' Caffery asked, as Tig handed him a mug of tea. 'Never want to tell them to go and get a life?'

Tig gave a short laugh. He rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and sat down, legs crossed so his foot was resting on the other knee, balancing the tea mug on his ankle. 'Listen, mate, I know the police. You don't really give a shit how I feel about my clients. You're not here for that. So what are you here for? What do you want to know from me?'

Caffery didn't speak for a second or two. He looked at Tig's eyes. The bad one was sort of grey and cloudy. A bit like a shitty London day. Caffery had a second of disorientation. A second or two where he couldn't read the guy at all. He turned over the photo of Mossy and held it out.

'Recognize him?'

Tig didn't hurry. He put the cup calmly on the desk, the handle to the side. He lifted his foot off his knee and put both feet on the floor, his hands on his thighs as he stood up and took the photo. As he examined it, Caffery thought he saw a contraction in the muscles at the corners of his eyes, no more than a millimetre's change. It came to him that Tig had already known exactly whose picture he was going to see.

'No,' he said, holding it to the light, squinting. 'Nah, sorry, mate. Never seen him.'

He held the photo out for Caffery to take, but he didn't. He was still watching Tig's face. 'You sure you don't know him?'

'A hundred per cent. Never seen him in my life. Here — take it back.'

Caffery waited a moment more. He was trying to get in under this bloke's cloudy eye, trying to get a flicker out of it, just a dilation in the pupil, anything to tell him he was lying. But there was nothing. Just this sort of weird evenness he didn't know how to interpret.

In the end he took the photo, tucking it into his folder. He left his hand on it and thought about the next question he had to ask. And then, because he hated the question and because he knew where it would lead, he thought for a few moments about the girls on City Road and what he could be doing now instead of this. What he could be doing to forget. The thought made him want to sigh again. He took his hand off the folder.

'Your clients,' he said. 'Do you s'pose any of them would recognize him? Maybe I could have one of my lads come out and have a chat to them?'

Tig snorted. Gave him that look Caffery knew from years and years of doing the exact same thing in south-east London. 'I shouldn't have to tell you about client confidentiality. It's the backbone of the whole set-up. We'd be ruined if we ran around opening our arms to the police every five minutes.'

'Yes. I know. But…' Caffery spoke slowly, ponderously, studying the backs of his own hands as if he was more interested in them than in the words coming out of his mouth. 'But do you know what I'm picturing?'

'What?'

'I'm picturing your future, Tig. I'm picturing your future and all the steps you can take to change it. And then, on the tail of that, I'm picturing all the people out there now, all the people this same thing might happen to in the future. The victims that aren't victims yet…' He let that hang in the air — the victims that aren't victims yet — so that its implication sank down a little. This was the best lever he had, to move the responsibility away from the police and on to the interviewee. 'Maybe even someone you care about. I'm picturing them, and I'm picturing their lives going ahead, happily, maybe having a house, a family. And then I'm seeing the opposite. I'm seeing them murdered. Mutilated. Hands taken off. With a hacksaw. An ordinary hacksaw you can buy in a hardware shop. What sort of a future is that?'

He saw that Tig was caving. A little patch of white had started on his forehead, as if the blood had stopped flowing.

'Look,' Tig said, 'I've got a responsibility to these lads.'

'And to their futures. This guy on the photo — he's got to be a lot like some of your clients, same lifestyle. What that tells us is that if it happens again, it's likely to happen to someone a bit like him.'

'But I can't have your people down here, can't do that. My clients'll never trust me again.'

'It's your decision. It's only you who can decide to do the right thing.'

There was another pause. 'Tell you what,' Tig said at last. 'If you leave the photo I'll let the guys see it. Maybe something'll come out of it like that.'

'Can I rely on you for that?' Caffery wanted to play the game out a little further. 'The future victims… can they rely on you?'

'Mate, listen now. I'm giving you a promise. OK? I make you a promise. You take it or you leave it.'

Caffery slid Mossy's photo back out of his folder and passed it over. Tig picked it up, his face tight, contained. He put it on the photocopier and ran off copies, standing with his back to Caffery, who sat for a while, not speaking, wondering if there was something else he should be asking. On the floor near the photocopier was a bag he hadn't noticed before, a holdall with a fleece draped over it. He vaguely registered something familiar about its logo. It was making him drift a bit when Tig said, 'Do you know about me?'

'What?'

'You didn't look at my record before you come here?'

'What would I've found if I had?'

Tig handed him the photo and sat down. He rubbed his hand across his shaved scalp. 'What you said earlier — don't I ever get tired of it. Do you know how come I don't?'

'No.' Caffery looked down at the bag again, then back at Tig. 'No, I don't.'

'Because it's me. I'm one of them. Or I was. That's why I never get tired of them or of the shit they're going through — the self-hatred, the misery, the awful fucking hole you fall into when you're an addict. I know what it's like to break a car window for a ten-pence piece on the dashboard, to rob my mum's pension, to pick someone else's stash out of a pool of their puke. I know what it's like to be down there.'

'Why're you telling me this?'

'Because I nearly killed someone.' He paused to let that sink in. 'I've done my time, but I can see you finding out about that and coming back, getting a bit tasty with me, maybe pointing fingers. Better tell you now so it's no surprise.'

Caffery sat back in his chair. For a while the only noise was the photocopier whirring and flashing, sending the smell of copying ink into the air. Then he said, 'Well? What happened?'

'An old lady. I was high. Went into her house to rob her and ended up half killing her — tied her up with the bedside-lamp cord and smashed both legs with an iron.'

Caffery smiled slowly. Something cold was creeping into his skull. 'And you're telling me you regret it? That you're straight, learned your lesson? That you're a productive member of society? That we should be having a soft little session about rehabilitation?'

Tig smiled back nastily. 'Ah, yes. I should have known. I should have seen in your eyes. You don't believe people can change. Forgiveness isn't a word you use in a hurry.'

Caffery tried to imagine what it'd be like to wrap electric cord round an old lady, then hit her so hard with an iron that the bones in her legs shattered. He tried to imagine what Penderecki had done to Ewan. What it would be like to rape a nine-year-old boy. How loud would someone have to scream to make you stop? Penderecki had had his shot at redemption — he never did time for Ewan, and he could have made anything he wanted out of his life. But he had died, alone and penniless with no family or friends, just a pile of children's underwear catalogues in his council house. And even that was about a million times better than he deserved.

Tig stood up and took the huge bunch of keys from the desk. He went to the door, and turned. 'Is that it, then?'

Caffery got to his feet, snapped closed the leather folder and went to the door. He stopped next to Tig and looked into his eyes. 'Just one thing,' he said softly. 'If you took my legs away from me do you know what I'd want?'

'No. What would you want?'

'I'd want to pay you back.' He smiled, feeling as if there was blood on his teeth. 'I'd want to take your legs in return.'