Ritual

31

17 May

Once, when Caffery had first started living with Rebecca in his family's three-bedroom terrace house in south-east London, after a particular bastard of an argument, she'd taken his face in her hands and said, in a voice that was tender, not angry: 'Jack, sometimes being with you isn't like being with someone who's still alive. It's like being with someone who's dying.'

For four years he'd kept those words contained somewhere in the back of his head, trying not to forget them but trying harder not to think about them too much, so they got like a memory of her perfume, or a half-remembered tune. Then, of course, along came the Walking Man and jumpstarted the memory.

It had opened something in him. It was as if a new channel had appeared in his head, making the back of his neck ache. Somehow, without understanding how, he knew the Walking Man would point to Keelie and the other girls on City Road and say they were about death, about him hoping for death. And then he'd point directly at Caffery's job. 'And as for that,' he'd say, 'more than anything else that is about your death.'

The next morning in his Kingswood office, a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the convenience store on the desk as he opened the orange courier's package that had come overnight from Marilyn, Caffery was thinking about his job, thinking about it as a kind of death. Marilyn had scribbled a note to him on a bit of Met stationery: 'Call if you need any more ADVICE Love M x.'

'Thanks, Marilyn,' he said, with a wry smile. He crumpled up the paper and was about to put it into the bin, then changed his mind. He found Sellotape and taped it to the wall so that Marilyn could do what she'd always wanted to do — monitor him constantly. Then he went back to the package, slowly pulling out the various wallets and bound folders. There was everything in here he could want: photocopied theses on African ritual; a folder of newspaper cuttings about Adam, the boy in the Thames; a list of contacts at universities in the UK and abroad. One, he noticed, was in Bristol. There was also a disk labelled 'Swalcliffe.pdf' in a clear pink cover. An Adobe Acrobat presentation. He slotted it into the computer.

Marilyn, he decided, as the Metropolitan Police logo came up on the screen, had put this together herself. She'd been a HOLMES inputter when they'd worked together and she'd always loved her computers. It was designed as a lecture, with bigger files appended to the presentation through hyperlinks, and that morning, as the sun got higher in the sky, as the Kingswood station came to life around him and people came and went from the shops outside his window, he silently blessed Marilyn for her nerdishness. In two hours he learned more than he'd ever known about a continent that had been a mystery to him for years.

Muti, like she'd said, was a much bigger picture than he'd imagined. It started on the ground with witch doctors 'throwing the bones', casting sacred objects, bones, beans or stones, in a circle to divine the needs of the client. From the witch doctor's divination sprang the remedy, and of these the list was bewildering: there was bushbaby fur for babies who cried too much, chitons to stop your partner cheating on you, pangolin, porcupine fish, aardvark claw. Every part of almost every animal, it seemed, had a place in muti.

Caffery tried to read the page to the end, but the words blurred after twenty entries so he went back to the main lecture. When he clicked on it, he knew instantly he'd moved into a darker place: human body parts. The first thing that came up was a picture of a human skull, laid out on a pathologist's table, a measuring tape next to it. He read the text carefully, giving it time to sink in. Most muti human body parts were stolen from corpses, but the muti from the already dead was weak compared to that from the living: the medicine would be more powerful if the victim was alive when the mutilation happened, the louder the screams the better, and of the living by far the most powerful medicine came from a child. It was all about purity.

He looked away from the screen, suddenly overloaded, his eyes tired. He took time to spoon some sugar into his coffee and watch it make a little island and slowly sink. Vaguely, he remembered hearing that in South Africa six men had been charged with raping a nine-month-old baby, believing that sex with it would cure them of AIDS. The thought made parts of his mind ache.

The next section of the lecture defined the difference between human sacrifice, in which the death of the person was the most important thing and would appease a deity, and muti murder, where the aim was the harvest of body parts for use in traditional medicine. Brains endow the client with knowledge. The breasts and genitals of either sex bestow virility. A nose or eyelid can be used to poison an enemy. The next slide showed a piece of severed flesh lying on a towel. It wasn't until he read the caption that he understood what he was looking at. A penis can bring success in horse-racing.

'Christ,' he muttered, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. He'd have liked a whisky instead of the coffee, but if he let himself have one there'd be another on the heels of the first and before he knew it the day would be in the toilet. He scrolled down, looking for mention of human blood, but there was nothing, so, thinking of his visit to Rochelle's, he searched for the Tokoloshe.

At first he put in the wrong spelling, TOCKALOSH, and the search engine came up with zero. He tried two more spellings, then TOKOLOSHE and this time the computer blinked and whirred and came up with a result. He found the section and had read a short way through when he had the urge to stand and pull the blind down because suddenly he didn't feel comfortable in the office and he didn't like the way he could be seen by anyone on the street.

A Tokoloshe, the Acrobat file told him, was a sprite, a witch's familiar. Left to its own devices it was no more than a nuisance, but if it came under the power of a witch it became a danger, a thing feared and reviled. As Rochelle had said, some believed a bowl of human blood would appease a Tokoloshe, but there were other ways of protecting yourself: a cat, or an image of a cat washing its face, was enough to keep it at bay, or you could cover your skin with grease made from Tokoloshe fat, which you could buy from a witch doctor. Marilyn had scanned in an article about two men in South Africa arrested on an armed robbery. In their car the police had found a human skull with a piece of meat inside it. The robbers had stolen the skull from a grave and the meat was a meal for a Tokoloshe they believed was protecting them.

Caffery clicked on the next slide and the screen filled with a crude drawing of a dwarf-like creature with a lolling tongue, proudly holding its cock up to the viewer. Reading the caption, his chair pulled close to the screen, the sun coming through the slits in the blind and heating his face, coldness crept through Caffery: 'The Tokoloshe's penis is a symbol of his danger and masculinity. Women put their beds on bricks to keep out of his reach. Traditionally a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank.'

… a water sprite, he makes his home in a riverbank. Caffery read it again, his head thumping. He was thinking about the waitress at the Station — about the kid she'd seen exposing himself. And then, inexplicably, he thought about a wisp of shadow in an alleyway, the red of Keelie's lipstick, the sense that a foot had walked across the bonnet of the car. He got to his feet, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. On screen, the Tokoloshe grinned back at him.

'Fuck off,' he muttered, hitting the button on the monitor rather than closing the file. 'Fuck you.'

It was time to go back and see Rochelle. Time to ask her a few more questions.

She was pleased to see him. He could see that right off. In a pink zip-up hooded top, her hair held off her face by a white headband, she looked as if she might have been getting ready for a workout in spite of the full make-up. She put her hands behind her back and leaned her bottom against the wall so her breasts were pushed towards him. 'Hello,' she said. 'Changed your mind about the beer?'

'Can I come in?'

She inclined her head and stood back to let him pass. He went through the kitchen into the living room. The two girls were watching America's Next Top Model. They were in exactly the same position as they'd been yesterday. If it wasn't for the fact they'd changed their clothes he'd have thought they'd been there all night. He stepped over their legs and went into the conservatory at the back.

'Can I get you a drink?' said Rochelle, coming in behind him, bending to plump up the cushions. 'I've got a smoothie-maker. Me and the girls had strawberry and peach this morning.'

'That's OK. Just had some coffee.' He reached inside his folder, feeling for the plastic wallet he'd brought. The Dobermann was on the floor in the sun, eyeing at him with vague interest. 'I won't be long.' He found the picture. It had been taken at a Chamber of Commerce event and it showed Mabuza clutching a glass of red wine, talking intently to a councillor. He was wearing a suit and a traditional mokorotlo hat over his greying hair. Caffery slid it out of the wallet and held it out to her. 'This guy. Ever seen him before?'

Rochelle glanced at the photograph, then back at Caffery's face. 'Yeah — it's Gift, Kwanele's mate.'

Caffery closed his eyes briefly.

'What?' said Rochelle. 'What've I said?'

'Nothing,' he said, putting the photo back into his jacket. What a fucking idiot he'd been not to ask her yesterday. He put down the folder and sat on the sofa, looking around the room, at the knick-knacks, the little vases and the framed photos of the kids. There was a picture of a cat — a kitten, actually — washing its face in a splash of sunshine.

'Rochelle,' he said, 'do you remember you told me Kwanele was scared of a devil?'

'A devil? Ain't likely to effing forget, am I? The Tokoloshe. Spent his whole time thinking about the bloody thing.'

'Yes,' he said, watching her face. 'The Tokoloshe. And what did he tell you about it?'

'Well, that's just it. He never told me about it exactly. It was Teesh he used to talk to.' She called into the living room, 'Hey, Letitia?'

'Wha'?'

'Come in here a second, beautiful.'

There was a pause, then one of the girls appeared sullenly in the doorway, chin down.

'Wha'?'

'Say hello to Mr Caffery.'

' 'Lo,' she said.

'Sometimes I think they liked Kwanele more than I did. Didn't you, Teesh, beautiful? Liked Kwanele?'

'Yeah. Suppose.'

'Bought you a Wii, didn't he?'

'Yeah. He was cool.'

'Now, baby,' Rochelle said. 'Remember the Tokoloshe? I want you to tell Mr Caffery about it.'

Letitia peered over her shoulder at the skirting-board behind her — as if that was what really interested her and not Caffery. 'Really short. Lives in the river. Looks black.'

'Speak up.'

'I said. I said it's short. It's black. It's deformed. It lives in a river and it's always naked, OK?'

'Letitia,' Caffery said slowly, 'how do you know about it? Did Kwanele talk to you about it?'

'Yea-ah.' She made the one word go up and down so it sounded like a sentence: Yes, my God, didn't you know that? Where've you been all your life, you muppet? 'He only talked about it like all the time.'

'What did he tell you?'

'Just lo-oads. It eats people. I seen it once too.'

'Teesh,' Rochelle said warningly, 'Mr Caffery's a policeman. You tell the truth now. Not what Kwanele told you to say.'

Letitia looked at her mother, then at Caffery. 'I did see it,' she said. 'It was like totally weird. Mum just doesn't never believe nothink I ever say.'

'Oh, here we go again.'

Caffery held up his hand to pacify them. 'Letitia, where did you see it?'

'Down by the river. Where Kwanele's warehouse used to be.'

'And did anyone else see it?'

'Just him and me. It was night. He took me there to do some — what d'you call it, Mum?'

'Stocktaking.'

'Stocktaking. And it was late and when we was coming out of the warehouse there's this sound in the bushes, like a bird or something, and there's this thing sort of half bent over. And water running off it. Which makes us both think it was coming out of the river.'

'OK,' Caffery said, his head full of the dwarf in Marilyn's slide presentation, of the pontoon outside the Moat late at night. 'So you're saying Kwanele saw it too?'

'Yeah — and he's like so scared. He starts going like this.' She put a hand on her chest and breathed in and out rapidly, hyperventilating. It was creepy, Caffery thought, sitting in the sunlight and watching this little girl acting it out. 'And then he puts his hand over my eyes and makes me get in the car, and he jumps in after me. And we was coming home and he keeps shaking and crying, and speaking African, and saying how he was going to do something about it. I mean, how scary is that?'

'But he knew it was the Tokoloshe?'

'Oh, yeah. He reckoned he was lucky him and his friend had someone who knew what to do about it.'

Caffery sat forward. 'What did he mean by that?'

She shrugged. 'Someone who could get rid of the Tokoloshe — y'know, stop it coming too near him at his work and stuff.'

'Did he say who his friend was?'

'Nah, never said all that much.'

Caffery turned to Rochelle. 'Was this the same time he bought the bowl? The one I took yesterday?'

'Yeah,' she said. 'That's when it all kicked off.' Caffery put his elbow on the sofa arm and rested his chin on his hand, one finger under the tip of his nose, thinking hard. Someone had helped Kwanele Dlamini. The friend — it had to be Mabuza.

'Letitia,' he said, after a while, 'you're sure you really saw the Tokoloshe?'

' 'Course I am. Just told you, didn't I?'

'Teesh,' Rochelle hissed. 'Remember? The truth.'

'It is the truth, I've told yer.'

'It's what Kwanele told you to say.'

'No,' the little girl insisted, a slow wash of colour coming up her face as she met her mother's eyes. 'It's not what he told me to say. It's what happened. I'm telling you the truth.' She let out a long, impatient breath. 'How comes you never fucking listen to me?'

Before Rochelle could answer Letitia turned on her heels, her fists balled, and went into the sitting room. She said something to her sister, who got up, shooting her mother a pointed look. Then there was the sound of their feet on the stairs and a door banging.

After a few moments Rochelle breathed out. She looked despairingly at Caffery. 'You got kids, Mr Caffery? Any little ones?'

He shook his head. He was thinking about what Letitia had said: He reckoned he was lucky him and his friend had someone who knew what to do about it. It was making him think about things he hadn't thought about until now.

'Well,' said Rochelle, 'let me give you some advice. Don't. Don't even think about it.'

Outside Rochelle's it was a cool spring day, the acid-green ornamental trees and the tended grass in the development every now and then giving the faintest stir in the breeze. But for Caffery, sitting in the car, his hands resting on the steering-wheel, it might as well have been mid-January. He wasn't thinking about the blossom on the branches or the way the sun was so high in the sky or the slight rise in temperature. He was thinking about circles. About rings.

Criminal behaviour was like a sponge: it sucked others into it. Almost every idiot he'd ever picked up over the years had had a little coterie attached. If you thought about it, it wasn't much different from any other social group. Every ring had a different structure, a different size, a different satellite configuration, but they had one thing in common: they had a leader. Sometimes the group was so loose the MC didn't even realize he was boss. But on the whole, in most rings, the one who was in charge knew exactly what he was doing.

Somewhere, out there in Bristol, someone knew more than was good for them about the African continent. They might be British, they might be African. They certainly knew a little too much about African ritual and belief; they knew very well how deep superstition ran in people; and, more importantly, they knew how much money could be attached to fear. It wouldn't be difficult to pinpoint wealthy Africans living in the country.

Nor would it be difficult to hire someone, some poor bastard who'd never have the luxury of normality from all Caffery'd been told, to loop up some ridiculous fucking dildo, grease themselves up and appear to the right person at the right time. Nothing too obvious, a fleeting glimpse. A shadow. Just enough to convince someone superstitious enough they were being stalked by a demon. And then the brains in the operation would go in for the kill, providing the goods to ward off the Tokoloshe, keep it away from the business. Human blood. And for proof that the goods were genuine, a video, real or a clever fake.

Mabuza. Caffery hadn't met him but he remembered his voice — sort of even and measured, a little too educated for comfort. He pulled out his work phone and stabbed in a number. He was going to get Interpol to track down Dlamini and then he'd get the surveillance guys to knock on Mabuza's door. They were going to ask, respectfully, whether he'd consent to the house being searched. And then, also respectfully, they'd offer him a lift to the station. Because Caffery was going to have to do this interview a little earlier than he'd hoped.

The phone clicked through, and he let his eyes wander over to the Nailsea skyline. He was thinking about a human being with dwarf legs: a squat half animal that ran through the streets at human knee height. And he was thinking about African witchcraft, secret rituals being practised behind closed doors. Someone was engineering it, he was sure, but he still had to blink to make sure he was seeing only sky and buildings, because right now, sitting here in the sunshine, he wasn't sure he'd ever get the image of the Tokoloshe out of his mind.