Ritual

by Mo Hayder

  She put the date loaf on the coffee-table. He stared ahead, his long yellow nails positioned just under the tip of his wide nose as if it was too heavy for his face and he was trying to stop it falling. Next to his chair, on top of a small cabinet, the computer was open at divenet, the international sport divers' forum, and next to that a photo of his African ex-fiancée, Maya. He'd lost Maya thirty years ago but said he still loved her. Maya's mouth, Flea noticed, was exactly level with Kaiser's right ear.

  'Kaiser?' she said eventually. 'Kaiser, the door was open.'

  He nodded.

  'Kaiser? Can you hear me?'

  He shook himself, glancing at the computer screen. 'Yes, Phoebe,' he said wearily. 'I can hear you. But I am so sad. So sad about your parents. Still. After all this time.'

  Ordinarily she might have sat down then, perhaps at his feet, or maybe she'd have hugged him. But she had to speak to him seriously. She sat in the chair opposite and tipped forward, elbows on her knees.

  'Kaiser,' she said. 'Remember whenever you cooked us anything Dad always used to nudge you? Remember? Nudge you and say, "Kaiser, old man, you sure there's nothing in this cake we should know about?" '

  Kaiser smiled. He dipped his chin, half laughing at the memory.

  'Except,' she said seriously, 'this time it's not a joke.'

  His smile faded. 'I beg your pardon?'

  'This time, Kaiser, it's not anywhere near as funny as I used to think it was.' She gave him a long, level look. His eyes were pus-coloured, a bit bloodshot. Something about his big-boned face had always made her think of a hairless goat. 'See, now I realize it wasn't ever really a joke. Not to the people who mattered.'

  'What on earth do you mean?'

  She turned to the cupboards in the recesses on either side of the fireplace. They were locked and, now she thought about it, there had always been things in Kaiser's house that were locked away, places she and Thom weren't allowed. People were always contacting Kaiser to ask about his shamanic skills and it made him laugh: 'I'm hardly a shaman. Just a dusty old lecturer.' But there was something hidden about Kaiser, something in the sinewy body, quite strong in spite of his age, something in the way he would stare fixedly at a person. Dad said Kaiser knew 'whereof he spoke' and that the cupboards were where he kept the ritual drugs. Flea'd always thought it was one of Dad's jokes. She wasn't sure she'd ever believed it or given it much thought. Until now.

  'Phoebe? I asked you a question.'

  She sighed. Picking up a piece of date loaf she sank back into the chair, sticking her feet out in front of her, her hands on her stomach, looking morosely at the cake between her fingers. 'I went into Dad's study, Kaiser. The place he keeps all his books. Some of your things are in there.'

  'Yes?'

  'Yes, and there's a safe too – I couldn't open it.

  The code's not in the study.' She fiddled with the cake, not giving in to the temptation to look at him. 'I searched everywhere but I couldn't find it so I wondered if you'd know what it is. Or if you know where he might keep it.'

  'Is that what you came here to talk to me about?'

  'Do you know where he'd keep it?'

  Kaiser took in a deep impatient breath, and let the air out slowly through his nose. 'I don't know anything about a safe or a code. And I repeat, is that what you came here to ask?'

  Flea put the cake back on the plate, and rotated her head, as if she had a crick in her neck. 'Kaiser,' she said, after a while. 'Kaiser, do you know why Dad used to lock himself in the study for days on end?'

  Kaiser levered the footrest down with a clunk so he was sitting forward. There were a few moments' silence. 'Let me ask you, Phoebe. Do you know why? Do you know why your father did it?'

  'I think so. Yes. I think I probably do.'

  'Your father's drive to understand was greater than anyone's I've known. He must have talked to you about Secondary Attention.'

  'The places in our heads – places we can't always get to except if we're dreaming or fainting. Or maybe hypnotized. That's what he used to talk about. A place that holds keys to things we've buried. And his way of getting there . . .' She lifted her eyes and met his. 'Was with drugs?'

  'Your father had many different routes. Sometimes it was meditation, but, yes, often it was drugs.'

  'I knew it.'

  'Don't judge him too quickly. David always had the need to uncover, to strip down his head – pull things out.'

  Flea let a moment pass. Then she took the bag of mushrooms out of her fleece pocket and dropped it on the floor between their feet. 'Psilocybin,' she said. 'I looked it up. It means "baldhead". The Aztecs called them teonancatls – flesh of the gods.' She was silent for a while, looking down at them. 'They could lose me my job.'

  Kaiser made a clicking sound in his throat. It was a sound she remembered him making years ago and had always thought you might hear it on the plateaus of Nigeria, a herdsman calling the shorthorn cattle to his side. But now she understood it was his way of marking the moment an idea came together. 'And you've taken them. I know you, Phoebe, I can hear it in your voice. You've taken them. Without consulting me.'

  'Yes,' she said slowly. 'And I want to take them again.'

  He snorted. 'Don't be an idiot.'

  'You said Dad used them to pull things out of his head?'

  'Yes.'

  'Don't laugh at this, Kaiser, but in all your research have you ever—' She let her voice drop to a whisper. 'Have you ever heard anyone say drugs can let them communicate with people who've died?'

  Kaiser sighed. 'Your parents, you mean?'

  'Mum.'

  He shook his head and got up, standing facing the locked cupboards. He put one hand in the small of his back. That fragility – it was a lie, she thought, not for the first time that night. There was something strong in his long muscles and his claw-like hands. 'Phoebe,' he said, in a low voice, 'there are some things you have to let rest – you can't keep going back and raking it over.'

  'Would Dad have let it rest?'

  'No.'

  'Then you know I'm never going to.' She sat forward a little. 'It could lose me my job, but that doesn't change anything. I want to go back where I went last night.' She paused. Her voice had been getting quieter and quieter. 'I saw her, Kaiser, I saw her. She was trying to say something about the accident.' Flea shook her head and screwed her hand into a fist. 'But I couldn't quite . . . couldn't quite understand what she meant.'

  Kaiser's face was grave. 'What did you say?'

  'I said, something about the accident – something in the way we're thinking about it – is all wrong. We've been looking in the wrong place.' She held his eyes. 'Kaiser, I'm going to do it – I'm going to take them again. Find out what she meant.'

  A long, long silence rolled out between them. Something was happening behind his eyes – she could almost see the computations he was making. Then, when it seemed they'd be locked there for ever, Kaiser broke away, and went back to his chair. He sat for a moment, hands on the armrests, head turned sideways, looking at his ex-fiancée's face. 'If you want to communicate with people who've gone,' he said quietly, 'there is something. A hallucinogen you can control, a drug that is legal. Your father introduced me to it.'

  'But you don't believe it, do you? You don't really believe it's all true?'

  'There'll be some literature about it in your father's study.' Kaiser pretended not to have heard the question. 'Please, read it, then come back to me. Throw away the baldheads – they won't take you any further. But this will.'

  '"This"?' She sat forward, creeped and excited all at once, as if her skin had been brushed the wrong way. 'What's "this", Kaiser?'

  'What's "this"?' He smiled to himself, a little sadly, as if it was a secret he'd known he'd have to give up one day – that he had to be big about letting it go. '"This" is called ibogaine.'

  'Ibogaine?' She whispered the word. It put pictures in her head of firelight and people dancing ancient dances in the dark.

  'Ibogain
e,' Kaiser said. 'And if you really want to speak to your mother again . . .'

  'Yes?'

  '. . . then it's the only route to take.'

  9

  14 May

  The morning of the second day of the case, drinking coffee on Bristol harbour and watching the dive team assemble their kit, Jack Caffery was thinking about a direction: he was thinking about west. For a long time it wasn't going to be west for him when he left London, it was going to be east – the direction that for an Englishman means cold winds and invaders. At about the same time that his sense of a connection with Ewan had disappeared he'd been doing a job in Norfolk, and maybe that was why he'd felt pieces of him had got stuck there. For a while after the abrupt ending of his sense of Ewan, he'd looked for a position in East Anglia, monitoring vacancies on the web. But when months had gone by with none coming up, he'd turned his attention to the west where something more interesting was happening.

  A prisoner had been released from an open jail.

  A man who understood a particular species of violence. The more Caffery thought about it, the more he knew he needed to meet him. Then, almost like an omen, a position came up in the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. The wait for Norfolk was shelved and it was west that Caffery came: to smugglers and apple orchards and Somerset, the land of the summer people.

  It was odd how things had worked out because there was something about working in the west he liked: a straightforwardness instead of the freakiness of London where, whatever you did, it all ended up a bit warped. Now, as the sun sparkled off the boats and the restaurant windows and the courting swans in the harbour making heart shapes with their necks, he told himself he was liking the west. Yes, he thought, looking down to where the dive unit had finished loading the boat and Flea was standing in its bow zipping up her dry suit, if it wasn't for some promises he'd made himself, if it wasn't for the bad way he felt inside about women, he could get to like this place.

  She was only a couple of feet below him, her hair pinned up wildly round her small tanned face, her feet planted wide to balance as the boat rocked. Now that he looked at her closely he saw her pause, her hand at her collarbone. She wasn't facing the harbour, the part they were going to dive this morning, but the opposite direction, back towards the quay – at the point where the pontoon met the wall a few feet beneath his feet. It was the exact place the waitress had pointed to when she'd described seeing the odd creature coming out of the water.

  It was a moment or two before anyone noticed her expression, then PC Dundas, who was about to throttle up the motor, glanced at her and saw that something was wrong. He let go of the tiller. 'Sarge?'

  'Yeah – hang on.' She held up a hand. 'Hang on.'

  She was staring at the harbour wall, as if she was trying hard to remember something important – something just out of reach. Caffery remembered a snatch of tourist blurb he'd read: the harbour and the Cut had been built by prisoners of the Napoleonic wars and still stood, almost two hundred years later, mossed, slimed and blackened from decades of engine oil and pollution. To him they were unfamiliar and weird, like a dungeon, but Flea must know them back to front so her sudden interest made no sense.

  'Sarge?' Dundas said, frowning. 'Sarge? You all right?'

  She didn't turn to him. Instead she raised her head to Caffery. 'It was raining yesterday morning,' she said. 'Wasn't it?'

  He gathered himself quickly – a bit unprepared for the direct way she was looking at him. He put his elbow on the handrail and leaned over. 'Yeah. Yeah, it was. Why?'

  She stared at him a bit more, sort of blankly, as if she was still trying to work an idea out of an awkward corner of her head. Then, a passing boat sent up a swell that rocked the little launch and her concentration was gone. She shook her head and finished zipping the dry suit. She pulled on her harness, then her fins. 'Come on,' she called, signalling Dundas to start the engine. 'Let's do it.'

  Caffery watched the boat set off, leaving a foamy trail in the muddy water. Flea was bending over, checking her cylinders, tapping gauges, clipping the lifeline to the harness with a D-ring. He was in a way glad to see her go – she had a way of looking at him as if she knew all his secrets, not just the ordinary ones but the dirty ones too. As if she knew where he'd gone after he left the harbour last night. Now he couldn't tell if the bad taste in his mouth was from the bottle of wine he'd drunk or the memory of what he'd done in the back of his car, parked in the alley next to the dumpsters.

  He watched till the boat had gone round the corner, then finished his coffee – the third cup, because whatever happened he couldn't allow a hangover into his day. The fingerprints on the hand hadn't come back. The IDENT1 computer wasn't as bad as the old NAFIS system but it could be slow and overnight it had only pulled up one of the five prints needed for comparison. But the path report was complete and made disturbing reading. The pathologist had recovered some fibres from the hand, purply-blue ones that she'd sent to the lab at HQ, and she'd agreed that the marks on the bones had been made by a saw. She also said that the hand had probably been removed when the victim had still been alive.

  All of which had brought the superintendent down a bit on his fury with Caffery. He'd assigned a level to the case and the Major Crime Investigation Unit had sent a staffing quota of a three-man HOLMES team for the incident room at Kingswood, two more DCs, a DS and a civvy investigator – a retired officer – plus a crime-scene manager and a scene liaison officer. It lit Caffery up to have decent manpower – there were another four men due at the quayside by eight a.m., ready to start interviewing anyone who worked in or frequented the area. Today the harbour would be running with police.

  He crumpled the coffee cup and was about to head back to the road to meet his team when the sound of the utility craft made him stop. It was heading back towards the pontoon fast, Flea in the bows wearing her dive hood, no mask, staring at the same part of the harbour wall she'd been pulled by five minutes ago. As the boat came nearer and Dundas killed the engine, the stern came round so it lay alongside the wall. She leaned forward and, grabbing the buddleia trunks that grew out of the mossy quayside wall, dragged the boat sideways, stopping every few inches to press her hands against the stone, inspecting it with a frown.

  'What's up?' Caffery peered at her head – shiny and dark like that of a small seal. 'Found something?'

  'Nope. I've worked something out.'

  'What?'

  'The witness statement,' she said, breathing hard now. 'Did you read it?'

  'Only in outline. They took it at New Bridewell. Why?'

  'I got most of it from your super in the briefing. Right from the beginning it bothered me.' She squinted down at the harbour wall. She brushed aside some algae, squinted again and shook her head, dismissing whatever had caught her attention. 'It bothered me that he could see the hand at all. Bothered all of us.'

  She stepped her hands further along the wall, digging her nails in. Caffery took a few steps along to keep up with her. 'And it still bothers you?'

  'It was nil vis in the water yesterday. I just couldn't square it – how he could have seen the bloody thing.'

  Something caught her eye and she stopped again. She swung her legs round so she was sitting on the stern of the boat, fingers digging into one of the mossed old stones of the quayside, her feet wedged against the pontoon so she could push the craft into the wall and get her face close to it. Dundas had found a mooring pin and was holding on to it, steadying the boat. She made a small, satisfied noise and pushed her right hand at the wall. Caffery leaned over as far as he could but all he could see was her head, her shoulders, her face, turned sideways and screwed up in concentration, and her arm disappearing deep into the wall.

  'I said, is it bothering you now?'

  She nodded. Her eyes had the shortened focus of someone who is working by feel alone. 'Yes. And he said there wasn't . . .' She pushed her arm a little further in. 'He said there wasn't anyone else on the quayside. Didn't he?'

>   'Far as I know. Maybe it was floating.'

  She glanced up at him. Blue eyes that gave him a jolt because he hadn't noticed before that there was something a bit wild about them. Then she dropped them again and all he could see was the top of her dive hood, and her arm burrowing into the wall.

  'A hand on its own doesn't float,' she said. 'It just wouldn't. Even if it had started to decompose . . .'

  She broke off. She pulled her arm out of the hole and looked at what she held in her fist. A lump of congealed black slime with pieces of leaf and stick in it. She rolled backwards a little and dropped the mess on to the pontoon, giving it a cursory examination with a finger, her face tight with the strain of holding herself up.

  Then she glanced back at Caffery – that flash of blue light in her eyes again. 'Even if it's decomposed, which this one wasn't, a hand still wouldn't float.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because it's too heavy, so much bone, not much soft tissue. And even if there was enough gas the skin's broken, so the gases would've escaped. No gases, no floating.' She inserted her hand back into whatever hole she'd found. He could smell it – the foul odour of drains and dark places. This time her arm went in all the way up to the shoulder. Her face was pressed against the wall, squashing her cheek forward. 'Which means he's either lying. Or . . .'

  'Yes?'

  'Or it got washed into the water by a current and he happened to see it going down. It was raining yesterday morning. So, for example, it could have come out of a storm drain.' She grimaced as she tried to get a grip on something. With a little grunt she wedged her free hand against the wall and levered herself backwards, pulling her right hand out and delivering the second wet handful of slime on to the pontoon. Then she pulled back, both hands either side of the hole and peered into it. The sleeves of her dry suit were covered with green moss and slime. 'A storm drain. Like this one.'