Ritual

  But she held on to the doorframe, her face confused, looking from one of them to the other, her mouth opening and closing as if she was trying to speak. Tig got up and took her arm.

  'Oh, Tommy,' she muttered. 'Please. Tell them to go away, will you, love? Tell them to leave me alone.'

  'Come on, Mum, you're dreaming again. Back to bed.'

  'Tell them to leave me alone – the blacks.'

  'Mum, please.' Tig put his arm round her and tried to coax her back down the corridor. 'Come on, darling, back to bed.'

  But she resisted. She clung to the doorframe, and turned her head to Flea, as if she might help. All the veins under her yellow skin were standing out blue and sick-looking. 'Oh, dearie,' she whispered. 'Oh, my love, I'm in so much trouble.'

  'Mrs Baines, do you remember me? I'm Flea. I met you before. Remember?'

  'Ask them, dear, will you? Ask them to leave me alone with their bang-bang music and their smells. Tell them to stop running up and down my corridor and putting their faces through my walls.'

  'Don't worry, Mrs Baines.' Flea stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. It was cold and as fragile as a matchstick. 'I'm sure Tommy's got it all organized.'

  Mrs Baines blinked at her. Then she began to cry. It was a thin, confused sound, no energy in it. She reached out for Tig. 'Tommy, stop the little one putting his face through my wall again.'

  'Mum. It's a television programme. You've watched too much television.'

  'I know it's a television programme, Tommy. I know. Have you got that butter knife?' She twisted away from him, peering blearily round the kitchen. 'Where's the butter knife? Your dad's butter knife with the bone handle? Give it to me so I can defend myself.'

  Tig glanced despairingly at Flea and she knew he was asking her to help him through this. But all she could do was wrinkle her face sympathetically. Maybe she was kidding herself that because of Thom she could understand what Tig went through with his mum. But this was much worse than having a brother who was out of work and depressed. What Tig dealt with daily was beyond her. And, somehow, he still managed not to use.

  'Come on, Mum, I'll get you back to bed. Then I'll bring you some hot milk. You'd like that, wouldn't you?'

  'What about the butter knife?'

  'I'll bring that too. As soon as you're in bed I'll bring it. I promise.'

  'And you'll stop them looking at me? When I'm in my bed?'

  'I will. I promise. I'll switch the TV off.'

  And he eased her away through the door, his hands on her shoulder-blades, two beaten people, moving slowly down the crowded hallway, leaving Flea alone to stare blankly at the kitchen door swinging on its hinges, thinking that whatever your relationship with your parents somewhere along the line there was always pain.

  It was turning out that the Walking Man wasn't like everyone thought. Apart from the cider and the money – Caffery was sure no one knew about the money – there was more. For one thing he didn't stop in the place he found himself when the sun went down. It was more planned than that. He had pit-stops all over the West Country, little hidey-holes just off the road where he knew he wouldn't be bothered. He left things hidden there, under rocks, under cattle troughs, tucked into crumbling walls. On this pit-stop he had tins, a pile of foam-rubber mats and four jars of scrumpy buried in the loose earth next to the hedgerow.

  'Should always drink the alcohol produced by the land you're standing on.' He uncorked the glass jar with his teeth. 'You go to Cuba, you drink rum. You go to Mexico, you drink tequila. Never get a hangover if you do that. Generations of wisdom've gone in to making these drinks. Generations learning how a body rubs up against the climate and the soil and the water.'

  Caffery unscrewed the bottle of Scotch and tipped the contents on to the frozen earth. He leaned forward and held it out to the Walking Man, who carefully filled it with cloudy scrumpy, holding the glass mason jar to the bottle neck.

  'And in Somerset you drink apples. Cider.'

  The fire was blazing well now, throwing its light into the faces of the two men. They sat on the corrugated squares of foam and watched the night fall. As the last of the daylight faded, the glow of the lights of Bristol came on to the north-west, misty and distant under a grey sky like a fabled living city, as if dragons lived there, not students and drugs-dealers and people gone bad enough to hack off someone's hands and bury them under a restaurant.

  Caffery sat back and put the bottle to his lips. The scrumpy was cold, but it brought such a hit of autumn and childhood apple orchards that he almost drank it all at once, just to stay in that memory and not think about buried hands.

  'Farmer I get that from,' said the Walking Man, 'until nineteen ninety he was still putting a carcass into the vat. A pig or a chicken. Said it sweetened the mixture and since the inspectors stopped him the scrumpy's not a shadow of what it used to be.'

  Caffery drank some more, straight down, not caring about the car parked on the lane and whether he'd need to drive home. This was how farmers and workers had lived for years and there was something comforting about that. Now, with the cider in his mouth and the honest coldness of a ploughed field on his backside, he let the weirdness of the day fall away from him, let himself stop worrying about some poor bastard with no hands, dead or dying. He wiped his mouth and pulled up his knees, rested his elbows on them and leaned forward.

  'What do I have to give you?' he said. 'I can't give you money and I can't see what you need.'

  The Walking Man gave a wry smile. 'I need you to give me two things.'

  'Two?'

  'The first is I need you to tell me who it is who's come here out of nowhere, off the road like a ghost, asking me to turn my past over to him.'

  'I'm Jack.' He held out his hand, straight in front of him, waiting for him to shake it.

  The Walking Man didn't raise his own. 'Jack? And there's another name comes along with that one? A second name?'

  'Caffery.' He lowered his hand and put it on the ground next to him, half embarrassed by it. 'Jack Caffery.'

  'Jack Caffery.' The Walking Man laughed a little. 'Jack Caffery, Policeman.'

  He stoked the fire and moved the cans expertly around in the bottom. A thin line of steam came from two and these he set aside in the embers. The sun had gone now and the white puffs of old man's beard caught in the top branches had taken on a blue haze, like tiny night-time clouds.

  'London, then? Is that where you live?'

  'No. I live here. In the Mendips.'

  'But you're a London boy. I can tell it from looking at you even before you open that policeman's mouth of yours.'

  'Family's Liverpool, Donegal before that – but me, yes, I'm London. And now I'm here. I got a transfer two months ago.'

  'To the west?'

  'Because I wanted to talk to you.'

  'You could've just got an off-peak supersaver. Spent the day with me. Gone back to the Smoke where life is so much better, eh?'

  Caffery gave a dry laugh.

  'But that's not it,' said the Walking Man. 'Is it? There's more than just wanting to see me.'

  'There's always more.'

  'There's a woman?' A smile twitched under his beard. 'Jack Caffery, Policeman, don't smokescreen me. There's always a woman.'

  'Was. There was a woman. Yes.'

  The Walking Man watched his face, waited for him to speak. Caffery sighed. 'She wanted children. The harder she asked for it the more I couldn't. Until we get ourselves into this pressure-cooker of a life, and before we know what's happening . . .' He clapped his hands, sending out a puff of air that made the flames waver. 'Hey,' he said, dropping his hands and smiling. 'I suppose I didn't love her enough. But whatever happened I couldn't do it. I just couldn't have a child. Not after what I've seen happen. To children.'

  There was a silence. The lights of a plane from Bristol airport rose up from the horizon and glinted, cold and silent, and both men looked at it, both maybe pretending not to be thinking about that word, 'children', and the differ
ent things it meant to them. When Rebecca had talked about having children she referred to the C-word, because she knew, for Caffery, it was one of the most dangerous words she could utter. She said that without a child the energy he was putting into life was wasted – going into a dead hole. When he asked her what that meant she'd said: 'The energy you put into finding out what happened to Ewan – the same energy you put into the job – means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It goes nowhere and creates nothing.' Which was funny, because he'd never thought of his job and finding an answer as wasted energy. But whenever he thought of a child, a family, the only thing he could imagine was something loose and ethereal, something you could lose in a second. Like trying to gather mist with your bare hands.

  After a while the Walking Man got painfully to his feet. He pulled tin plates from the store under the hedgerow and brought them back to the fire. He used a stick to roll the tins out, squeezing one between his feet to hold it still while he cut into the lid with a Swiss Army knife. 'We're going to eat in a minute.' Sweat appeared on his forehead. It ran through the grime and into his beard. 'We'll eat. And then we'll talk some more.'

  Caffery held the bottle between both hands and looked up at him. There was only ten years between them but, for a reason that probably had something to do with the scrumpy, this felt as natural and reassuring as looking up at a father. More, maybe. The Walking Man put food on the plates and they ate: steak pudding, little potatoes and some herbs the Walking Man had produced from a pocket. Caffery didn't know why it should be – maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the wake-up call of the scrumpy – but that meat and vegetable from burned tins tasted like the only meal he'd remember when he died. He wiped the plate clean with his fingers and licked them. The Walking Man had finished his meal and was watching him. 'Well, Jack Caffery,' he said, 'you left one woman behind, and what about now? There's no woman here? With you?'

  Caffery smiled. 'No. No woman.'

  'What do you do, then? For a woman?'

  Caffery put the plate down and reached inside his jacket for his tobacco. A habit he hadn't broken, even after all these years. He took his time rolling the cigarette. He couldn't help the way when he heard the word 'woman' the first picture he got was of Flea on the harbour that morning, dirty-blonde hair and her arms tanned under the force's navy T-shirt. When he licked the paper he didn't raise his eyes to the Walking Man. He kept them on the lights of Bristol.

  'Prostitutes,' he said. 'I go to prostitutes. Over there. In Bristol.'

  'Prostitutes? Or a prostitute?'

  'More than one. I hardly ever go to the same one twice.'

  'How often?'

  'Not often enough.'

  'How often's not often enough?'

  He lit the cigarette, took a couple of draws, thinking about the bodies and the faces and the streetlights. He thought about the cold void in his chest he must be imagining women like Keelie could close. 'Once a week. Why? What do you do for a woman?'

  The Walking Man showed his teeth a little, like bone, and the red edge of his tongue. 'That's over. With me that's been over since it happened. Belongs to another life. Don't miss it when you think of it being something other people do in another life.' He got to his feet and collected the plates, wiped them with a cloth and stacked them next to the ditch. He corked the cider, pushing the jar back under the hedgerow. Then he pulled out a long roll of rubber matting and tossed it into a ditch. 'It's time for me to sleep.'

  'The second thing. You haven't told me the second thing you want from me.'

  'In the spring I go to sleep an hour after dark,' said the Walking Man, as if he hadn't heard. 'Always have done, ever since they let me out of Long Lartin. You can stay if you want, but you don't want to sleep out here under the stars. For one thing it's cold. And for another . . .' He shovelled his clothing into the ditch, arranging it on the mat so he'd sleep on it and give it some of his heat for the morning. He took the sleeping-bag from where it hung next to the fire, rolled it up quickly to conserve the heat it had soaked in and laid it on top of the clothes. 'For another you won't want to sleep out in the open with me. I mean . . .' He clicked his tongue up behind his teeth as if he had something tasty there. 'I mean, how do you know what you'll look like when you wake up?'

  Caffery stood. 'There were two things. I've done one – what's the other?'

  The Walking Man came a little closer, and this time Caffery saw something infirm about him. Like a limp. Or a hesitation. 'There is one more thing you can do, Jack Caffery. And after that we can talk.'

  'Name it.'

  'The Snowbunting and the Remembrance. That's my price. A clutch of Snowbuntings and Remembrances.'

  'Snowbunting? It's a bird?'

  'No. Not a bird. It's a flower. A crocus. A little white spring flower.'

  'Where do I get a crocus at this time of year?'

  'You get the bulbs so I can plant them. But when you bring them you come to listen to me – you don't come with a lecture in your mouth, or an idea in your head of converting me and making me a productive member of society. I am who I am and you must not try to make me believe in redemption. Understand?'

  'I understand. No redemption.'

  'Good. The Remembrance is not so popular now, not like it used to be. Out of fashion and not easy to find. But . . .' He straightened and put his hand on Caffery's chest, holding it there as his hand rose and fell with Caffery's breathing. As if he was testing his heart. 'But you'll find them. You'll find my crocuses. I know you will.'

  16

  Car-jacking had arrived in the West Country. In 2006 the young professional owners of a Scénic MPV, driven in for the day from Wellington to see a show, had their car stolen as they parked near the Bristol Hippodrome. The car-jacker was wearing a red full-face ski mask and R&B jeans, and he'd waited until the wife was out and the husband was pulling on the parking brake before he struck.

  He dragged the driver out on to the pavement, breaking his wrist, jumped into the car and drove off at thirty miles an hour, causing ten thousand pounds' worth of damage to other vehicles in the car park. He took the road up towards Clifton, and no one knew how far he'd have got if it hadn't been that in stealing the car he'd also stolen a passenger. The couple's six-year-old daughter was in the back seat. When he realized this he dumped the car double quick, leaving it on the pavement in Whiteladies Road with the motor still running, the child unharmed. He disappeared into the grey afternoon, never to be seen again.

  Flea'd paid a passing interest to the case because she sometimes used the car park. She asked a friend in Intelligence for the details and when she went over what had happened one thing stuck in her mind: the child was sitting in a booster seat. Flea spent the next few days wandering parking lots, looking through the window of any Renault Scénic, looking especially for booster seats, until she was convinced of one thing: whichever angle the guy had come from he would have seen the child before he'd stolen the car. And when she looked at the witness statements she found the child reported that the first thing the offender had said was: 'Shut the fucking crying.' It didn't sound like someone who was surprised to find she was in the car: 'Shut the fucking crying . . .'

  What if, Flea wondered, they'd got it wrong? The police thought the car-jacker'd dumped the car when he realized the child was there. But how about if you turned it round? What if it wasn't the child's presence that had made him dump the car? What if the child – and the thought made her cold – what if the child being there had made him steal it in the first place?

  She became obsessed with the idea that he'd targeted the car for the little girl, and had got frightened into abandoning the kidnap. She started fishing, asking questions, offering theories. She made friends with a proactive intelligence officer in the vehicle-crime unit at Trinity Road and dropped by, asking what they thought. Then one day she got a call from her inspector. The first time she'd ever had to stand in his office, instead of sitting comfortably. He was to the point. 'I'm going to say this once and then we'll pret
end I never said it. Marley, wind your neck in.'

  And so she'd learned caution. Even though the little girl crying in the back seat of the MPV haunted her, Flea would never again get involved in something that wasn't her business. She made a self-pact: next time she found herself playing detective she was going straight to her inspector, putting her name down for the trainee programme and getting started on the CID 'aide' course. But that, of course, would mean an end to the diving. And because she was never going to give up the diving she went on doing her job, pulling out the bodies, searching for the knives and guns that had created the corpses, standing in the front line whenever the force needed muscle. But one thing she never did was think about the cases. No curiosity, no theorizing. It was a rule she had.

  Which was why that night, driving along the little country lanes that skirted the northern outskirts of Bath, the lighted abbey and the church spires glimmering against the dark hills, Flea deliberately wasn't having any ideas about how a pair of severed hands had come to be buried under the entrance to the Moat restaurant. Instead she was thinking about Tig, about whether he was the only one who understood how she felt about her parents. Whether he understood the guilt and whether he still carried a dark hole inside him for what he'd done to that old lady. She was still thinking about him when she got home, and she might not have given the hands another thought for the rest of the night if it hadn't been for the accidental discovery she made inside her father's study.

  It was late, the cottage in darkness, only the little lantern hanging over the door to guide her as she pulled the Ford Focus off the road on to the gravel driveway. The wisteria that twined round the lamp was dislodging the stones above the front door and, without the money to hire a stonemason, a couple of months ago she'd had to climb up a ladder herself with a plasterer's float full of mortar. She'd mixed it too hard, and now, only two months on, the soft Bath stone was cracking in a long, depressing line over the lintel.

  She let herself in, picked up the mail, and sorted it as she headed to the kitchen. On the top was a copy of the local property paper, a scaremongering headline in red: House Prices Drop in Second Quarter. Stuck on the front page was a pink Postit with one sentence scrawled on it: 'But we would always honour our original offer, of course. Best wishes, Katherine Oscar.'