Ritual

23

16 May

Katherine Oscar was dressed in a white shirt with beige men's jodhpurs tucked into riding boots, her hair tied back in a knot, loosely arranged as if she really hadn't spent much time on it. It was a fine and clever art being Mrs Oscar, and she worked hard to make sure no one would ever get away with calling her mannered. Or a snob for that matter. On this Wednesday morning, very early, she was standing on the Marleys' gravel driveway, irritation on her face. Her hands were on her hips, the early sun picking out the stray wisps of hair round her face, and her head was tilted back so she could stare up at the first-floor windows of the Marleys' cottage. Wondering, probably, why no one was answering the door.

Flea, just out of the shower and wrapped in a towel, stood quite still and watched her from the bathroom window. Ever since she could remember there had been one problem with living here: Katherine Oscar and her family. The steep walls of the Oscars' house abutted the Marleys' garden so there was always a sense of being overlooked — the Oscar children could lean out of the bedroom windows and watch the Marleys in the garden that had once belonged to the Oscars' house. The manor had other gardens on the far side, acres of them with a swimming-pool, stables and a knot garden, but the Oscars found it hard to accept that they no longer had sovereignty over the Marleys' garden too, and quite often they wandered on to Flea's property without asking, as if they had the right simply by virtue of their wealth.

The worst offender was the youngest boy, Toby, a stocky child with a pudding-basin haircut and close-together eyes. The crunch had come one autumn afternoon when Flea happened to look out of a window at the front to see him in the road below her peeing happily and copiously against her wall. She threw open the window and yelled at him, but he pretended not to hear, calmly zipping himself up and wandering back along the road towards the manor, scratching his head as he went, as if he was trying to remember something. By the time she had her shoes on and had got to the manor, the front door was closed. It took three rings to get anyone to answer.

'A place this cavernous we need two doorbells!' Katherine Oscar always had a joke to make about how enormous her house was — but when Flea explained what had happened her smile faded. She stepped outside and peered carefully down the road, as if she didn't believe it was possible that a child of hers had done something like that. She stepped back into the hallway, and closed her eyes. 'You know, it makes my blood run cold to think of the children being out there on this road. Thank you for telling me.'

She started to close the door but Flea got her foot inside. 'I'm not interested in the road, Katherine. I'm interested in whether you're going to speak to him.'

Katherine Oscar coloured. 'I'm sorry?'

'Are you going to speak to your son?'

'Of course I'm going to speak to him. What do you take me for?'

I take you for trash, Flea thought, looking at the blonde hair, the expensive blouse, the stud earrings. In fact, you know what, Katherine? I hate you. I hate the way you look down your nose at me, I hate the way you respect power and money, the way you swing your SUV round corners and force other cars to stop for you. I hate the way the other day you left your car blocking the road, got out and had a long conversation with your gardener not caring that three other cars had to wait five minutes so you could talk about fertilizer and bedding plants. I hate the way your chimneys belch smoke, the way you put out twenty bags of rubbish a week, and the way you speak differently to people who come to the manor to work for you. You'd scream the place down if a criminal came near you, and yet your husband is a pig in a Barbour who spends his life at a computer stealing from other people and is the biggest criminal I've ever met in my life.

She'd have liked to say it all. She'd have liked to pin Katherine Oscar to the wall and say it into her face. But, of course, she didn't. She knew how to hit someone, she knew how to do it efficiently and fast, but she knew how to hold herself together too, so instead she nodded. 'Good,' she said calmly. 'You speak to him, then. And speak to him properly, because if it happens again I'll have him done. Get it?'

After that the Oscars left her alone. From time to time she'd catch the boys glaring at her from behind the smoked glass of the SUV on their way to school and she'd hear them laughing at her from the windows of the house, but that didn't matter. The less she saw of them the better. For a while the only thing she heard from the Oscars was the faint sound of the horses in the stables on long summer evenings. But if she thought it would stop there she was wrong because Katherine simply couldn't let the garden idea go. About six months later she started leaving voice messages on Flea's phone, telling her how much the Oscars would still like to buy back the garden, in spite of their differences, and how they were going to speak to the council, to English Heritage, to local residents' groups and the National Trust about reinstating it as part of the manor. She posted notes through the door two or three times a month and dropped by every week just to 'say hello and see if you've had any more thoughts'. Keeping up the pressure.

Now, as the doorbell echoed through the cottage again, Flea knew she was here to ask about the note: Did you get it? Have you thought about what I said? About property prices? So she stood quite still, knowing she couldn't be seen, until Katherine got fed up with waiting and, with an impatient shake of her head — as if to say she never had been able to understand the Marleys, and why did they spend their money diving in stupid parts of the world when they could have bought a decent vehicle so their shabby cars didn't mess up the neighbourhood — she turned and walked stiffly up the drive. Even the sound of her footsteps crunching in the gravel had a specific note to it — as if her feet struck the stones more sharply than other people's would.

Flea waited for her footsteps to go and then, when she was sure she was alone again, she turned back to the opened bathroom cabinet, quickly scanning all the familiar things: spare toothbrush, nail scissors, her contraceptive cap in its case — years since she'd needed that, she should throw it away — moisturizer, hair clippers. She'd forgotten now what she was looking for — her head was too hot and full with all the things that had happened last night, as if an infection was starting.

Tucked at the back of the cabinet behind the vitamins she took, thinking they would boost her immune system and fight off the bugs and germs she was always immersing herself in, was a packet of Kwells, kept there for Thom's travel sickness. She was probably going to be sick this evening. Kaiser had warned her that the psychoactive ingredient in ibogaine would give her the symptoms of travel sickness. She hooked the packet out — probably years out of date, but better than nothing — and propped it on the sink for later. Then she closed the cabinet and dried off, throwing on loose trousers, a T-shirt and an old Chinese workers' cap over her wet hair. Finally she found her keys and jumped into the car. Holding the steering wheel, she studied the veins in her arm, standing blue and cold against the skin. Later today she was going to put a poison into her bloodstream, something to let her speak to the dead. And to do that she needed as much peace in her head as she could gather. So she didn't care what her line manager said about interfering with inquiries, it was very simple: the things she'd seen and felt last night had to go. They had to be passed on before she took the ibogaine.

As she left the driveway she let the old Ford spin its wheels in the gravel a couple of times. Then she sailed past the manor, sounding the horn a couple of times. Just enough so that Katherine Oscar heard and knew she'd been there all along.

It was the dust marks that had really got into Flea's thoughts. Mrs Mabuza — if the woman in the bedroom had been Mrs Mabuza — might have been a good cook but she was a bad housekeeper. The crucifixes dotted around the house were all perfectly clean, but each one stood in a larger dust mark. The crosses were clean because they were brand new, not because they'd been polished. And they stood in dust marks because they had very recently replaced something that had been there for a long time. The crucifixes were for show, Flea was sure of it. They were to make the world believe this was the house of a Christian.

When she knocked on the deputy SIO's door no one answered so she pushed it open a fraction. Caffery was alone, in shirtsleeves, standing with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets, his feet slightly apart, and absorbed in something outside the window. She studied him from behind, getting the clear impression he hadn't been home the night before. If it didn't sound so crazy she'd say he'd spent the night in the office. Or sleeping in the car. She wondered if he even had a home here, or if he was living in an HQ training-wing bedsit until he got settled.

Then, as she looked at the way his hair was cut short, clipped at the back of his neck, a picture flashed into her head of him in bed. He was asleep, one hand pushed out at his side. He was tanned and his face was squashed against the pillow so she could see the muscles in his shoulders slightly flexed. She cleared her throat, making the picture go.

'Hello.'

He turned. Something blank and half angry came into his eyes and for a moment it was as if he didn't recognize her. Then his face cleared. He took a breath and smiled. 'Oh, hi. Sorry — miles away.' He pulled out a chair and gestured for her to sit. 'You caught me on a daydream.'

She took off her cap, shuffled her fingers in her hair, and sat. 'What about?'

He leaned back against the desk, his arms crossed over his chest, one hand fiddling with a paperclip, and studied her. She didn't let herself think about it too much but a big part of her had registered lots of things about him — for example, that he didn't have brown eyes, as she'd originally thought, but blue, with very dark lashes. As dark as his hair. 'I wasn't expecting you,' he said, 'wasn't planning on working with your unit today. You must know something I don't.'

She took her eyes off his face and pretended to look at the tiny office, with its dull paintwork and faded area map on the wall.

'Flea? What's on your mind?'

'Right,' she said slowly. 'I want you to promise you won't let what I'm going to say leave this room.'

He raised an eyebrow. 'OK.' He half smiled. 'Try me.'

'OK. I'll be honest. I've done something stupid.' 'I see.'

'I went to talk to Gift Mabuza. The owner of the Moat.'

Caffery laughed as if he didn't believe her.

'Seriously. I went to his house last night.'

'He's not even in the country. Not until this afternoon.'

'He came back early. Maybe he knew you were looking for him.'

Caffery's expression went flat. He dropped his arms to his sides. 'You're serious. You really went to speak to him.'

'I didn't say I was Job.'

'So who did you say you were?'

'I didn't. I went with a friend of mine who knows him.'

He flicked the paperclip into the bin. 'Pretty stupid, if you don't mind me saying. Pretty fucking stupid.'

'I know.' She shook her head. 'But he's not going anywhere — I'm sure of that. He's waiting for you. And… on the subject of being pretty fucking stupid I did something else.' In spite of the look he was giving her she felt in her pocket and found the ziplock bag full of fibres. She held it out on her flat palm, under his eyes. 'They're from his carpet.'

He took the bag from her. 'What, these?'

'You said there were carpet fibres on the hands. So I thought… I thought maybe this would help.'

Caffery turned the bag over and over. Then he went to the filing cabinet, took out a paper evidence bag and put it inside. He uncapped a pen, seemed to be thinking about what to write on it. Then he changed his mind, scribbled a note to himself and stuck it on the bag.

'I didn't force my way in. I was there legitimately.'

'You know the section nineteen stuff well enough. It's an issue of consent versus true consent. You didn't tell anyone who you were and you used the relationship to get information,' he said, in a patient monotone. 'Let's hope the defence isn't awake, or can't be bothered to check, or they could say you've made yourself UC without authorization.'

Flea's jaw got tight. She'd told herself she wouldn't, but she felt like walking out. UC stood for 'undercover' and Caffery was probably right: the defence could get them for it. But she wasn't going to let him put her off. She forced herself to straighten up. It was a physical thing. Put her shoulders back — it made her feel stronger.

'What about the fibres?' she said. 'Do they look like the ones on the hands?'

At first she thought he hadn't heard. He was still looking at the paper bag, an expression on his face as if the fibres were communicating something to him. 'Are they the ones on the hand?' she repeated.

Caffery said, as if he hadn't heard her, 'You kept telling me yesterday — "He's African." What did that mean — he's African?'

'Are you sure you want to know?'

'I'm sure.'

'OK.' She gestured at the computer. 'May I?'

'It's slow. May as well still be on dial-up — Avon and Somerset's finest, and if the traffic's bad it can take five minutes for a page to download.'

She rolled the seat forward, using her heels to pull herself across the floor, and gave the mouse a shake on the mat. When the screen came up she waited for the connection, did the search — he was right, the server took ages — and went to the page she wanted. 'There,' she said, pointing to the photo.

Caffery came to stand next to her, bending a little to peer at the screen. If he hadn't gone home last night he had at least found somewhere to shower. He was close to her and he smelled clean. 'What am I looking at?' he said slowly. 'What's this?'

She was thinking of something she knew he'd remember: the headless, limbless corpse of a small boy found floating in the Thames. 'Adam', they'd called him, because the only clues to his ID were the orange shorts his remains had been dressed in, the contents of his stomach and that the killer had deliberately removed the first vertebra. 'When you were in London,' she said carefully, 'did you have anything to do with Adam?'

'Adam?'

'The little boy in the Thames. The torso.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Couple of my colleagues worked on it. But why…' He trailed off, his eyes on hers, his face suddenly drawn. 'Oh, Christ,' he said tightly. 'I see what you're talking about.'

She didn't answer. Eventually 'Adam's' trail had led the Metropolitan Police to Africa, where their worst suspicions were confirmed: the colour of the shorts and the missing bone, the Atlas bone, held by many African religions to be the centre of the body… everything had pointed to one thing.

'Muti,' Caffery murmured. 'That's what you're saying. This is a muti killing?'

'Yes,' she said, and for a moment they were both silent. Muti — black magic, witchcraft. The word was enough to make the room feel cold. African magic medicine: sometimes it included the killing and dismemberment of a human for use in a religious ritual. In the last decade there'd been signs it had wound its sheltered way into Britain.

'It was in a book I saw.' She said it quietly, as if it was rude to be talking about it aloud. 'A book about African witchcraft and shamans. It had a picture of severed hands — a guy in Johannesburg got done for it. He'd cut them off a corpse and sold them to a local businessman.'

'What was he going to do with them?'

'They're supposed to entice customers into the business. That's the idea. You bury them or put them into the walls and they beckon people in. And from what I could work out from the book, the place to put them…' she paused, '… is at the entrance.'

Caffery's eyes were slightly distant as if he was concentrating on the thought processes un-ravelling in his head. Then he looked at the screen again, and said, a little more quietly, 'And this?' An object, brown, about the size of a sleeping-bag crumpled up, was displayed in a glass case.

'This? Oh, God, I don't know why I had to show you this, but it made me realize just how far people will go.'

Caffery leaned into the monitor, studying the obscene folds, the edges yellowing and frayed. 'What is it?'

'What do you think it is?'

'I don't know…' Neither of them said it but something dark had crept into the room, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. 'I think, and don't ask me how, but I think I'm looking at someone's skin.'