Ritual

48

In spite of all his instincts, he'd decided not to go to Kaiser Nduka's. For a moment, standing in the car park looking at Flea, Caffery'd had the feeling he was balanced on an edge, that a breath of air could send him one way or the other: to help her, or to keep going on his usual pattern of following the job regardless. In the old days he wouldn't have been swayed by what a woman said, so what did it tell him that with Flea he'd fallen effortlessly on to her side of the fence? He'd made a solemn promise to investigate the disappearance of a scag-head who was too busy whoring himself to turn up for one lousy meeting with his mother. Still, it had been a promise, and the choice he'd made — of doing something to help Flea — well, he had a feeling the Walking Man would say something about it. In fact, he had the weirdest feeling the Walking Man would approve.

And now here he was, looking at the bedroom in Jonah Dundas's tiny flat. It was small, just enough space for the single mattress and a large milk crate containing some balled-up T-shirts and a pair of trainers. The top pane of the metal-framed windows had been smashed through and carrier-bags from a supermarket — Eezy Pocket — had been taped over the hole. They sucked and blew, in and out, as the air currents fifteen storeys up moved and buffeted the building.

Faith Dundas and her ex-husband Rich were in the doorway, trying to see the room through Caffery's eyes, hoping he would pick up a clue they'd missed. Faith was an unremarkable woman, dressed in a plain navy blue skirt and a pink sweater, neat low-heel pumps on her feet. Her hair was greying, scraped back in a bun, and she didn't look like the mother of a drug addict, except that her eyes were swollen from crying. It made her look as if she'd been punched in the face. This was the thing with the parents of addicts, Caffery thought: either they kicked the kids out and let them take their chances in the world, or they became cuckoo parents, killing themselves to keep up with the child that took more than its fair share of everything.

'Did he say where he was going last night?' Caffery asked, with his back to the window. 'Anything at all?'

'No,' Faith said, in a muffled voice. She had a tissue pressed to her mouth and it was hard to decipher what she was saying. 'All he said was he had a job. A special job. I've been thinking about it and thinking about it, but I can't remember anything else.' Tears rolled down her face. 'I didn't pay him much attention. I thought I'd heard it all before and I just…' Her voice trailed off into low sobs.

'What did he mean, "a special job"?'

She shook her head, more tears squeezing out of her eyes. Caffery raised his eyebrows questioningly at her ex-husband.

Dundas cleared his throat, squaring his shoulders. 'He was… I don't know. Going to make a lot of money.'

'How much is a lot?'

'One thousand eight hundred pounds.' He looked sideways at his wife. 'That's what he told her anyway.'

'One thousand eight hundred…' Caffery shook his head. 'Nearly two K? What sort of job was he going to do?'

'I don't know.'

'I mean, that's one hell of a night's work,' Caffery said. 'You've got to agree — it's one hell of a good night.'

'I wasn't there.' He glanced down at the top of his ex-wife's head. 'Maybe if I was there I'd've…' His big face tightened, as if he was going to cry. 'I'm sorry,' he said, putting a finger on the end of his nose and closing his eyes as if that might calm him. 'It's hard to say what he was going to do when I wasn't even there.'

Caffery picked up a T-shirt. It was balled tight, glued together by something white and crusty. He didn't want to think about what it was, so he dropped it and brushed off his hands. He eyed the pathetic mattress with its rucked nylon sheets and lumpy pillow. He told himself he'd been right not to have children with Rebecca. That he'd never have to be in Faith's position, in tears over the loss of someone who'd sucked him dry the way Jonah had his mother.

'He's sold his belongings, hasn't he?'

Faith stopped crying. She held her breath for a moment, then said, 'Yes. I believe he has.'

'Things you bought him?'

She nodded again.

'To keep his habit going?'

'I think… I think maybe.'

Dundas pulled her closer. He looked directly into Caffery's eyes, a hint of anger there. Trying to protect his ex-wife from herself. 'He'd been telling his mother he'd found a way to pull out of his addiction.'

'I see.'

'It might have been the truth.'

Caffery nodded neutrally. 'It might.'

'He said he'd made up his mind. He was going to clear his debts and use the rest to get off the gear.'

'And I suppose she gave him the money.'

'Not this time. This time she said no.'

Faith looked up at her husband, her chest in the marshmallow-pink sweater heaving. 'And now look.' She sobbed. 'Now look.' She buried her face in his chest, her voice rising higher and higher. 'And now look what's happened. Now they're going to cut off his hands, like they did to that other poor boy, and if they take his hands, if they do what they did to the other one, then I'll have to die too. Do you hear me? I'll have to die too.'

At these words Dundas went very still. He lifted his eyes and met Caffery's. He didn't say a word, but it was the kind of look that said paragraphs. Whole pages. They both knew what the other was thinking.

'Uh… Faith?' Caffery said. 'Why do you — what makes you think that's going to happen? What you said about his hands. What made you say that?'

'He's been here,' she whispered. 'Here in this flat. He used to come here sometimes. Jonah told me.'

'Who's been here?'

'Him. That poor lad.'

'Mallows?' Caffery glanced at Dundas and saw the words had come at him with a thump too. His face was grey, blue-veined. 'Faith?' he said. 'You're telling us Jonah knew Ian Mallows?'

'They were good friends.'

Caffery's thoughts moved very slowly, slowly but clearly — Jonah and Mossy. Jonah and Mossy. He put his face near to the window, staring past trickles of condensation trapped in the double-glazing. The brown lawns and parking spaces two hundred feet down looked as if they belonged to a different world, the people just specks of colour. In his head was BM's voice: He said people were going to get hurt. I remember him saying it now — said, 'There are some sickos out there, BM, and I don't know who they'd go out and hurt if it wasn't for people like me, stupid fuckers who give it up without a fight.'

In the end there was something about the fear and misery in Jonah's flat that Caffery couldn't bear. He called a family-liaison officer for the Dundases and when she arrived he made his excuses, rode the eighteen flights down in the lift and sat locked in the car to make the rest of the calls. He spoke to the inspector at Trinity Road, then to his SIO, and within half an hour he had door-to-door teams organized, bringing in half of the team that were out interviewing the drugs charities. When he'd done that he tried calling Flea's unit phone even though he knew she wouldn't answer. The acting sergeant was understanding, gave him Flea's private number, but the call was diverted straight into her voicemail. He didn't know what to say, so he hung up.

He sat for a while, watching a gang of hoodies glowering at him from the tower lobby — they could smell cop faster than they could spit, these kids — and he wondered about the money Jonah thought he was going to make. Eighteen hundred quid. Just a tad more than TIDARA were charging addicts to get clean. The pamphlet sat on the passenger seat and he picked it up, looking at the gnarled root, with his biro markings round it. He pulled out the phone again and called the multimedia unit in Portishead to tell them that when they'd found the CCTV footage of Mossy they needed to send a still of the guy in the white shirt to his phone. Then he switched the car engine on and slowly, slowly, let it ease out of the estate.

He was thinking about ibogaine again. Ibogaine and Kaiser Nduka, who knew all there was to know about how it was used in religious ritual. His address was in the Mendips, not far away: just one exit along the M4. Not far. The team could pick up here — he'd have time to get there and back. And, anyway, he had an itch that Nduka was important to the investigation.

Nduka lived in a part of north Somerset that had a look of France, with derelict stone buildings and wooded lanes that wound up and down the sides of hills.

Caffery drove slowly through clouds of midges, stopping once for a string of riding-school horses to trail past. The entrance to the driveway was easy to find, an oval wooden sign tucked into the hedgerow, the words 'Dear Holme' carved into it — a relic from when the place was built, by the look of it. From the road the going got rougher. The driveway rose steeply and was unkempt, with ruts and potholes and overhanging cowslips that brushed the car and left pollen traces on the windscreen. He felt as if he was coming through a jungle, as if he was venturing off the map, and when he looked at his phone display he wasn't surprised to see the signal icon shrink then be replaced by a crossed-out phone.

'Shit,' Caffery muttered. He shoved the phone into his breast pocket and drove on, losing all sense of direction until suddenly the overhanging plants and trees cleared, he passed a little area of overgrown grass, and the drive opened out. He was about a hundred yards from a ramshackle nineteen-fifties house, perched on the edge of a sweeping valley and surrounded by tumbledown outhouses. There were weeds in the asphalt, panes of glass — maybe dismantled greenhouses — piled up on the verge, and boards over some of the lower windows. It was deserted and forgotten-looking, but it wasn't the house that was making his heart thud. It was what was parked with its nose facing the front door.

A silver Ford Focus.

The number plate started 'Y9'. Flea's plate began with 'Y9'- he'd noticed that this morning in the car park at HQ. It wasn't much of a coincidence — there'd be hundreds of Y-reg silver Ford Focuses in the area. It was other things he'd noticed in the car park that bothered him more about this car: the tiny piece of material poking out of the closed boot as if she'd carelessly shut it on something, and the navy force holdall on the backshelf. Those couldn't be coincidence too.

Turning to the house, Caffery couldn't say why, but he had an image of things happening out here that couldn't be explained — of people doing brutal dances in the dark. Kaiser was one of the country's leading experts on witchcraft. He had a connection with TIDARA. Something cold trickled through his veins. What had Mabuza said? That the intellectuals were trying to set him up?

He slowed the car, letting it creep forward. Going quietly, taking care not to do anything quickly that might alert anyone inside the house, he turned off the drive into the grass, making a U-turn so the car was facing towards the road. He killed the engine and got out, closing the door with a quiet click. He didn't like places like this, desolate and uncared-for: they reminded him of a place he had been to once in Norfolk, a place where he'd once thought he might find clues about Ewan.

He stepped into the grass and approached slowly. There were no sounds, only the click-click-click of his car engine cooling behind him. A cat lying in the shade of a water butt opened its eyes and regarded him contemplatively. He got to the side of the house and stood in the shadow, the heat in the brick radiating against his back, feeling idiotic, creeping about like the SAS. He took off his jacket and draped it over the handle of a rusting garden roller, wiped his forehead with his sleeve and began to count. When he got to ten he'd walk to the front door and ring the bell, be official, say he wanted to talk about work. He'd laugh about it, stop tilting at windmills.

And that's exactly what he would have done if, by the time he'd counted to five, someone inside the house, someone only on the other side of the wall, hadn't begun to scream.