Ritual

21

By eight o'clock, when Caffery got back to the office, the HOLMES team had finished entering their actions for the day and had packed up. One of the team wanted some overtime so Caffery gave him the only drugs groups on the list that had evening sessions. Soon the place was deserted.

Enjoying the silence, Caffery footled around for a bit, pretending to himself he was being efficient, reading his messages, looking up biogs on some of the newer team members and doing a lackadaisical search on the force intelligence network for key words in the waitress's statement: River. Juvenile. When he typed in exposure the screen filled up so quickly the scroll-bar tab shrank to the size of a nailhead. The HOLMES operator had been right — just about a thousand guys in Bristol waggling their knobs at local girls in the dead of night. He didn't have the stomach for that list of entries.

He went to the window, pulled apart the blinds and a weird wave of despondency came over him. The halal butcher's opposite was closed, but the takeaway next door hadn't opened yet. He checked his watch. Eight thirty p.m. Kind of early. But it wasn't long before sunset. And that meant the girls would be out on City Road if you knew where to go. His fingers tightened on the blind, harder and harder, until he thought he'd break it if he stood there any longer. He got out his mobile and pulled up the number Flea'd given him — an old friend of her mother, she'd said, who ran his business from home.

The phone rang a few times and he was about to put it down, thinking he shouldn't be calling so late, when the nurseryman answered and said, rather slowly, that the Remembrance, well, now, she was getting on a bit, the Remembrance, in terms of what was popular, but he might be able to get 'some of she' ordered in the next couple of days, if Caffery didn't mind waiting, but Caffery'd have to drive out to Bishop Sutton to pick them up because he didn't do deliveries, mind. And while he had Caffery on the phone how was Flea Marley, love her? Wasn't it a tragedy what turned around and happened to that poor girl, her not even thirty yet?

'I think…' Caffery tapped a finger on the desk, feeling strange to be the only one not in on a story that everyone else knew. 'I think,' he said, 'considering everything, she's getting on OK… but I'll tell her you were asking.'

They talked a bit more about inconsequential stuff, payment, and Caffery didn't sound like he was from around here and just how did he like it in the West Country? Caffery talked calmly, but when he finished the call he was frowning, tapping his finger a little harder, wondering about what the nurseryman had said. A tragedy in Flea Marley's life. What sort of tragedy? he thought, and then he found himself wondering if she'd had a boyfriend to help her through it. And that was where he had to stop himself. Normal to be curious, old man, he thought, it's what made you a detective. That and the drinking. But don't let it go any further. There was a lot of damage he could do with thinking like that.

He went to the area map on the wall and put his thumb on Bishop Sutton, then stretched his hand until his little finger sat on Shepton Mallet. At first the Walking Man's routes had seemed random. But since the other night, when Caffery'd seen the stash of cider in the hedgerow, he'd come round to thinking there was something planned about where he went each day. He'd plotted out all that he could, using the few reports the intelligence database had hung on to, adding in the other night's stopover near Vobster quarry and now, standing in the badly lit office, he began to see a shape. It was like a half-open fan, or a slice of pie, its base at Shepton Mallet, the top arcing from Congresbury almost as far as Keynsham, the A37 marking the flat, leading edge. He stared at the shape a little longer, then pulled his jacket off the back of the chair and felt for his keys.

The thing about the Walking Man was that he moved all day long, every day. To find him you had to move too. Either that or you had to know what he was thinking. Keeping the fan shape in his head, Caffery drove out to the A37, an old route used by the Knight's Templars, one of the oldest in Britain. He passed Farrington Gurney and into Ston Easton, the hamlet's steep, dripping walls rising directly up either side of the road, slimy clumps of vegetation in the stones making it feel as if he was driving through the drained bed of an old canal. Outside the hamlet he slowed. There was no other traffic on the road, so he dawdled along, the headlights making icy filigree domes of the branches above. He kept his window open, leaning out on his elbow and searching the inky blackness on either side of the road for signs of the Walking Man's fire.

After a while he passed a small track on his right. He'd gone on a hundred yards when something made him stop and swing the car round in a U-turn. He pulled it well over on to the verge so that both wheels were off the road and he didn't need to use his hazards. Then he got out and climbed over the low fence into the neighbouring field. The countryside was black and unfathomable, only the greyish shape of a tree or hillock disturbing the darkness. Suddenly it was cold. He pulled on his jacket and stood with his hands buried in his armpits, letting the darkness come down over his head and round the back of his neck. He strained to hear the crack of a twig or to smell campfire smoke.

The Walking Man had cut off a man's nose using an Exacto blade from a craft kit. It had happened in the back of his garage in Shepton Mallet and he'd kept the guy still — Craig Evans, his name was — by taping him to an ironing-board using red and white 'Handle With Care' parcel tape. After the nose, which had made Evans puke blood for a bit, the Walking Man had used his thumbs — his thumbs, that bit got to Caffery more than anything — to press the man's eyes so hard into his head that they'd slipped out of the sockets. When he'd finished he'd propped the ironing-board against the wall and nailed his hands to the breeze blocks. Crucified him.

The police knew everything because he'd videotaped it so he could watch it later for his pleasure. They knew that he'd put both eyes, and the long slippery red trails that hung from them, on to a shelf, then he'd smashed both kneecaps with a crowbar, cut Evans's dick off, gone inside the house and coolly put the bits and pieces — the eyes, the nose and the dick — into a Cadbury's Selection biscuit tin. When the police found it, they'd decomposed so much they'd popped the lid.

Caffery breathed in, letting the cold sting his nostrils, thinking about the darkness. He listened to the silence a bit more, watched the mothy-grey spectre of an owl hurtle across the sky. Then, when he couldn't hear anything in the dark he went back to the car. He got in and sat there, looking at the clouds through the lattice of branches, shredding and sliding round the moon.

There was that faint ache in his limbs again, and it struck him that this time it was connected not to tension but to tiredness — and that the tiredness, in turn, was connected to the conversation he'd had with the nurseryman. Wasn't it a tragedy what happened to that poor girl?

It took a while for him to put his finger on it, to remember the feeling he'd had — of being on the outside of something. That he was the new one, the outsider looking in. Maybe he'd do some asking around about what had happened to her. Nothing so obvious that he'd look like a twat, though. And then he heard the Walking Man's voice: Don't miss it when you start thinking of it as something other people do in another life. Yeah, he thought, he's right, forget it. You'd've done it once — gone down every route to find out about her, about her secret, about what happened to her. But not now. Your world's a changed place now.

He switched on the engine and swung the car into the road. It was gone ten and by the time he got to City Road it'd be near enough eleven, which was the time Keelie came out on the street. He opened the window and the bitter smell of fumes and earth came into the car. Even if he really concentrated he couldn't remember Keelie's face, couldn't remember what colour her hair was. But what he could remember was she had the grace never, ever to look him in the eye when he was fucking her. And that, he supposed, had to count for something.