Ritual

  26

  When Flea had gone the office was quiet. He sat for a while in thought, thinking about the word 'muti', wondering why he hadn't thought about it before. He took the time to read the web page carefully. The human skin, he realized with a jolt, wasn't someone's skin but the skin of two people – two teenage boys. They hadn't known each other in life, but in death their existences had been inextricably combined, displayed in a box as an exhibit about smuggling in Dar es Salaam. The skins had been confiscated from smugglers whose trade was to flay people in Tanzania, then export the skins – sometimes to Nigeria, sometimes to South Africa – for huge sums.

  He stared at the picture for a long time, conscious of his own skin, of its shape, its inadequacy. Muti. Even the sound of the word was bad. The owner of the Moat, Gift Mabuza, had come back into town without telling the police. He was African, and in some countries it was a superstition to bury hands under the entrances to businesses. A basic equation.

  Caffery thought about Mabuza for a few minutes, tried to imagine what species of human he was. He was ready to bring him in right off, but when he thought about it he saw it would be a mistake: he wouldn't have the PACE adviser on hand if they needed to make an arrest. Best to build some intel, get the fibres back from Chepstow and know how to hit him. He'd called the immigration officer attached to Operation Atrium and asked him to look into Mabuza's immigration status. Then he'd got on to his SIO and talked him into okaying directed surveillance for twenty-four hours, just to know that the guy was staying put. But as he was putting the landline down, his work mobile began to ring in his pocket. He flipped it open. 'DI Caffery, MCIU. How can I help?'

  There was a moment's silence, then a stiffly polite voice, slightly accented, said, 'My name is Gift Mabuza.'

  Caffery was quite still, his pulse coming back at him in the earpiece. 'I know who you are,' he said quietly. 'What can I do for you?'

  'Your men spoke to me on my holiday. I have come home because I have heard about the trouble at my restaurant.'

  Caffery hesitated. Then he said, 'Yes. There's been some trouble.'

  'I would like it if I could come and talk to you.'

  'You'd like to come and talk to . . . ?' He let the sentence trail off, still hearing his heart thumping. 'OK. Good. That's no problem. How does . . .' He tried to think what to do. He'd like to know what the lab had to say about the fibres before he interviewed Mabuza. 'How does . . . tomorrow morning sound?'

  'Yes – good. I would like to get to the bottom of this business.' There was another pause. Then, in that over-educated way, Mabuza said, 'Thank you, sir. Thank you and goodbye.'

  The line went dead. After a while he put the phone into his pocket and used his index finger to push the little bag of carpet fibres around on his desk, thinking about Mabuza. Had he sounded like someone with something to hide? Then he thought about Flea in the office, the way she kept fiddling with the zip on her fleece as she talked, the way her fingernails were clean and white, her limbs straight and slim under the force regulation overalls. If she'd looked like a regular Support Unit sergeant he might have laughed her out of the office. Muti? Was he being walked into a theory he wouldn't have come to himself?

  Technically he should record Flea's visit to Mabuza's house in his policy book, his decision log and his pocket book. He should state quite clearly that he'd advised her of the ways she'd breached the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. He should have done all of that – but he didn't. Instead he put away all his logs, cradled the phone receiver against his shoulder and tapped in a number. Marilyn Kryotos, the woman who'd managed the HOLMES computerized investigation system in his old Metropolitan Police unit. She was up at the Yard now, detailed to a specialist team advising on ritual abuse and witchcraft. It'd been set up as a reaction to the cases of Victoria Climbié and Adam. Adam, the pathologist reckoned, had been between four and seven when he'd been ritually dismembered. All the intelligence indicated he'd been alive while it was happening. No one had been done for it yet.

  The line hummed and clicked on the third ring. 'PC Kryotos.'

  He hesitated. The familiar calm voice. It took him back to the way things used to be in the Area Major Investigation Team in London; to the daily whirlwind of a chaotic investigation. The only thing to ground it, stop it spinning out of control, had been Marilyn Kryotos. No ego, no grandstanding from her. In spite of himself he smiled. 'Hey, Marilyn. Guess who. Blast from the past.'

  There was a silence. Then a small, sarcastic laugh. 'Not so distant past, Jack. It's only been a couple of months.'

  His smile faded. 'Not happy to hear me, then? What? Am I on your shit list or something?'

  She didn't answer. She let the line hum a little.

  He sighed. 'I know what you're thinking.'

  'Do you?'

  'Yeah – like everyone else. You're thinking I'm a tosser.'

  'Are you?'

  'Marilyn, haven't you ever left anyone?'

  'Course I have. Years ago. Before the kids.'

  'Well, then.'

  'It's not that you left her. I mean, she was nuts, Jack. Pretty, but nuts. Last week she was in the paper – looks like she's got her medications, used make-up and blister packs and stuff, and stuck it in an acrylic block and called it art. Me, I never had time for her, you know that. So it's not that you left exactly – it's the reason you left. I mean, what sort of reason was that? Jack, I never said this to you before because of the situation, but you're not my line manager now and—'

  'And now you can give me a piece of your mind?'

  'Jack, you're not getting any younger. I hate to say it, but you're staring forty in the face, aren't you?'

  'I don't want kids, Marilyn. Not now, not ever.'

  'Jack, everyone should have kids. Everyone. Even walking disasters like you. You're not a complete human being until you have kids. Please trust me on this. And, Jack, I've never said it, but the truth is you'd make a—'

  'Let's change the subject here, it's getting—'

  'No. Listen to me . . .' He could picture her face at the other end of the line. Sort of cross but patient too, as if he was her son. 'You, Jack, whether you like it or not, would make a brilliant dad. OK?' She gave a little puff of air, like he'd forced her to do something she didn't want to do. 'There, I've said it.'

  In his cramped little office, with the dying plant on the windowsill and the view of the halal butcher's, Caffery moved the phone from one ear to the other. The computer had popped up one or two search results, but the reflection of his face was superimposed over them and he really didn't want to look at his own eyes. He turned the chair to face the wall.

  'OK, Marilyn,' he said. 'I'm bleeding on the floor. You finished with me now?'

  'I s'pose so.'

  'Can we have a professional conversation?'

  'S'pose.'

  He gave a dry laugh. 'Queen of my conscience. Never abandon me, Marilyn.' He dug at the vinyl armrest with his thumbnail. 'Look, I've only been here five minutes and already I've stumbled on something I don't know how to handle. Whichever way I turn, one word keeps coming up. Witchcraft. That's why I called you.'

  'Then fire.'

  'Hands. Severed hands, near or under the entrance to a business. I'm being told from elsewhere it's a witchcraft thing. African.'

  'Well, whoever "elsewhere" is, they're right.'

  'Rings some bells, then?'

  'Got any African connections to it?'

  'Maybe. The owner of the property is African – but the hands, well, they're white.'

  'Except white flesh is considered more powerful by some people. That's still how it is in some parts of Africa, the old colonial thing. White man makes more money, white man is more powerful, his flesh makes better medicine. Stronger muti.'

  'You mean witchcraft.'

  'No. Medicine – everyone gets muti and witchcraft tangled up. And just to make it more bloody complicated the name changes from tribe to tribe. One word you see a lot in the press alo
ng with muti is ndoki. Now ndoki really does mean "witchcraft", but it's what they call it further up the continent, West Africa. It's the area our team's studying at the moment.'

  'You're enjoying it, aren't you, Marilyn? I can hear it in your voice. You like this job.'

  She laughed. 'Jack, I'm finding out about the world. I'm not just plugging in data on every sordid south London nonce. And you know what?'

  'What?'

  'The more I look at it, the more I think it's not that weird after all. It's not that different from Chinese medicine, and nobody screams voodoo about that. Everyone assumes Adam was murdered to use his body parts for muti – somehow that name got attached to his case. But we think he was murdered for black magic, which isn't the same as medicine.'

  'Subtle difference.'

  'Subtle, yes, but still different. For muti, we don't automatically think about human body parts. The place we start mostly, Jack, is with the Endangered Species Act.'

  'How come?'

  'Muti's usually about animal parts. Every animal's got a different power. I mean baboons. I never even knew what a baboon was, Jack, until I was in this job – can you believe it? – but now I do. No one likes the baboon in Africa. They're like foxes, really cunning and nasty, and no one thinks twice about killing them. But because football's a rising thing over there you can sell a baboon's hands on the open market. They're supposed to help a goalkeeper stop goals.'

  Caffery turned his chair round, pulled up the Guardian intelligence database and entered Endangered Species as a search term. He waited for the computer to crank its way through the millions of entries. 'Marilyn,' he said, pulling his chair nearer the screen. 'Have you got anything you can send over to me?'

  'I'm doing it as I talk. I'm sending you an info pack we've made up for distribution. Nottingham's got one from us already and Manchester – this thing's really picking up across the country. I won't put it through the registry, I'll courier it today. There's a couple of bibliographies in it, contacts for academics, practitioners, that sort of thing. But most of all there are press releases and cuttings.' She paused. 'And, Jack?'

  'What?'

  'You're going to be really careful, aren't you, how you tread? In London this is a seriously hot issue right now. The right-wing press – you can picture it, can't you? – they've made it a race thing, like every African, every black church, every Pentecostal minister is doing ritual abuse, exorcisms, the works. Truth is, there've been maybe a handful of cases in the last couple of years, two or three that've stuck, but because there've been kids involved, the press are getting all their hot buttons pushed.'

  Caffery nodded slowly. There was so much tension in the country's big cities, the streets felt like any spark could take the whole lid off. In front of him the computer was stacking up results: there were already five entries. He put his glasses on and pulled the chair closer to the screen. 'Marilyn,' he said, 'you get that info pack off with the couriers and you say hello to everyone at home. OK?'

  'Yeah,' she said drily. 'I mean, it's not like you've got any family of your own to say hello to.'

  'Marilyn,' he sighed, half smiling at her cheek, 'it's always so good to talk to you. Thank you for your support.'

  When they'd said goodbye he returned to the screen. The searching had stopped and of the ten in the list he could see immediately which entry was going to interest him. The report was sketchy, just the bare minimum because the case had never got to court, but it must have set off alarm bells for the intelligence officer who had logged it, because the attachments were detailed. Caffery scrolled through it. It had been originated nine months ago by a traffic officer near the Clifton Suspension Bridge. He'd stopped someone for dodgy brake lights and when he came round to speak to the driver, there, hanging from a ribbon on the rear-view, was a decaying vulture's head.

  Caffery opened the photograph attached: a grizzled head like an outsized, misshapen chicken. Its thin neck was carefully tied with red ribbon, and there was a National Lottery ticket lodged in its beak. At great expense the police had sent the vulture to be identified by Bristol Zoo, who'd sent back a series of pictures along with, he could guess, a sneery note. The 'vulture' was a fake. The dissection photos were attached to the report showing how, once the skin was peeled back, it turned out to be the skull of a small sheep filed down at the snout to resemble a beak and wrapped in shavings of chicken meat. Big laughs all round, but the point here was that the driver had thought it was a vulture. He refused to say where or why he'd got it. Said it had been in the car when he'd bought it and he'd never got round to removing it, but the police officer, who'd been watching a programme the night before about witchcraft, guessed he was looking at a fetish.

  Caffery scrolled through the report for the name of the driver. Kwanele Dlamini. He half closed his eyes and read it again, a little smile at the edges of his mouth. Dlamini. It sounded the way he imagined a Zulu chieftain to sound. African.

  So, then – he pushed his chair back and got his jacket – it seemed there was a little visiting to do. Just a little visiting.

  27

  Thom wanted to write Flea a note so she didn't forget he was going to borrow her car. He needed to be reminded of appointments like this, and it made him think she would too, so he insisted on sitting at the table and putting it on a Post-it in his laborious handwriting. Flea stood at the sink, her arms crossed, studying his faintly bruised-looking eyes, the dark lashes lying diagonally across the pale skin, the way he crabbed himself over the paper to write. His colour had come back, but somehow she knew it would never return properly. If someone had asked her when she'd last seen her brother, she'd have answered truthfully: on the day of the accident two years ago.

  It wasn't that she hadn't seen him physically since; in fact, she hadn't left his side, not through all the hospitalization in Danielskuil when they'd told her he might die, or during the dreadful journey home via Cape Town with the air hostess who wouldn't give her a paracetamol for him because the airline was afraid of being sued, or during the eight weeks of the investigation into their parents' death. She'd seen the physical Thom, his body, the shell he was in, but her brother was gone. You could look into his eyes and see nothing. So she would say that the last time she had seen him was that day at Boesmansgat when he emerged from the sinkhole crying and vomiting, thrashing his arms in the water.

  Under him yawned the dark hole, a hundred and fifty metres wide, and three hundred metres deep. Like an oubliette for a sleeping predator. It was a grave too. Bushman's Hole had taken three divers in the last decade, and now two more: David and Jill Marley. Dad had gone first, heading straight down into the dark. Mum followed. Thom had made desperate grabs for them, and for a few moments he'd even had a precarious grip on Mum's right ankle, but he couldn't keep hold. It was as if, determined to get to the bottom, they had both turned face down into the gloom. Which was unthinkable because the bottom was a hundred and fifty metres deeper than they'd intended and they had both known it was suicide to go even ten metres deeper than the dive plan.

  They'd planned it scientifically, because if David and Jill Marley knew anything it was respect for the water. Bushman's Hole was the pinnacle for them, the height of a lifetime's addiction to extreme sport diving. It had started a long time before the kids came along, so long ago that Flea didn't know the exact equation it had sprung from. But she did know one thing: it was Dad's gig. Mum had gone along with it, had got an enthusiasm of sorts going, but Dad was the addict, fatally attracted to it, and Dad who, in his quiet moments in the study, dreamed he was in the deep.

  He'd been wearing a video camera on his helmet in Bushman's Hole. He'd have filmed his descent, and his own death. But the South African investigators had never found the bodies or the camera, and with only Thom's fractured memories to go on they couldn't do much more than put the Marleys' death down to either 'narcosis' from a miscalculation in the deep-dive gas content or possibly a hyperoxic blackout. The British coroner, who'd got permission from the
home secretary to hold an inquest without the bodies, ruled out narcosis – the disorienting euphoric effect nitrogen can have at too much pressure. Because the 'Trimix' combination of gases the Marleys were using was specifically designed to combat narcosis, the coroner guessed instead that David Marley had begun to breathe too fast and deeply, shutting down the sensitive carbon-dioxide receptor in the back of his neck, which had knocked him out. When he'd started to drop Jill had tried to stop him – that much they knew – and maybe descending so quickly she'd held her breath, causing the Trimix system's oxygen sensor to over-deliver oxygen. In effect she'd died in exactly the same way as David had: from hyperoxia, too much oxygen.

  He'd been a kind man, the coroner, and had added in his summing up that the Marleys' son Thom had done the right thing to let them go. As difficult as it was, it was one of the most important rules in technical diving and he'd stuck to it. He should be commended for it – should be proud. Instead, of course, it was destroying him. He'd let his parents die.

  Flea didn't know what she felt guiltiest about. That she hadn't been with Thom in Bushman's Hole when it had happened, or that, deep down, she'd been glad that Thom had gone along on the trip to Danielskuil. It used to be her Dad pushed, always urging her on – 'See that tree, the big one? Bet you can climb that, Flea Marley!' She'd never thought of saying no, just done as she was told – knowing in some dark corner of her heart that if she didn't it would mark her out as different. Weak, somehow. Not a true Marley. But then Thom had come along, a shy little thing who didn't walk until he was nearly two, and Dad's focus shifted away from her and on to Thom. The message from Dad was clear: Never show fear. There is no place in this family for cowardice. It became instinct, the same instinct that had driven Thom years later when he had climbed with his parents into the cold, motionless eye of Boesmansgat.