Ritual (36 page)

'Oh, fuck,' she muttered thickly. 'It's true, then.' She sat down at the little computer table, propping her face in her hands.

He turned away from the photographs, wanting to touch her, to rest his hand on her hair, knowing that he couldn't. 'Tell me.'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Except . . .'

'Yeah?'

'Except that when I went to see Mabuza I was so sure he knew I was job.'

'How come?'

Something guarded crossed her eyes. 'Nothing – just I had a feeling he'd been warned. The place was covered with crucifixes, as if he was trying to show he ran a good Christian household. And . . .'

'And?' Caffery said, eyes on the photographs.

'He's gay,' she said quietly. 'Tig. Very gay.'

'Gay as nails,' he said, 'by the looks of things. Didn't you know?'

'Yes, I knew,' she said, in a monotone. 'I always knew. He let me doubt it, but now I think he was trying to open me up, get me to feed him information about the case.'

'Which he'd feed back to Mabuza. I knew someone was emceeing the fucking thing, just didn't think it'd be some white gay boy.'

Flea was still staring at the walls. 'But that's Tig for you – most of his clients are black, Asian. He's street, you know. He's one of them. For a while Atrium even liked him for a snout.'

Caffery examined the small bookshelf above Flea's head. Lined up was a row of MPF diskettes. One had the word 'Magic' scrawled across it in crude writing. The next two had the name 'Mabuza' printed in Magic Marker.

Caffery had his hands on the little MPF diskette when something stopped him. It made him feel cold and still all at once. It made him turn to Flea. They didn't need to speak – both knew what the other was thinking. They were thinking that they had just heard what sounded like someone, quite nearby, pushing over a large piece of furniture.

'Where was it from?' Caffery whispered. He stood above her, hand out, the dust and sweat from the chase through the streets engrained on the underside of his shirt sleeve. 'Where did it come from?'

'I dunno,' Flea murmured. It wasn't coming from the flat . . . not exactly. It was coming from the back of the room where another flat would be.

She turned very slowly and looked at the bed, the cupboard. She was picturing Tig's mum last week, muttering to herself in the kitchen.
Stop the
blacks coming through the walls. Stop them
putting their faces through the walls.

'The walls,' she whispered.

'The
walls
?'

'Check them.'

He gave her a strange look, but went to the wall anyway, sweeping his hands along it, feeling for anomalies, his expression saying he was humouring her. He pulled the bedspread away from the window, searching for an airbrick maybe, or a hole he hadn't noticed, while Flea got down on the dirty, gritty carpet to scan the wall under the bed. Nothing. It was only when Caffery went back to the wardrobe and opened it, kicking aside the junk on the floor, that she saw him react. She saw him half turn away, then stop.

'What?' She got up, came to stand next to him and saw what he was looking at. The back of the wardrobe wasn't plastered. A piece of plywood was propped upright behind the hanging clothes. He dropped to a squat and looped his fingers behind it, then pulled it away from the wall, setting loose a cloud of plaster dust. Immediately they could smell mould and ammonia.

'OK,' he muttered, dusting off his hands. 'I think we've found him.'

Behind the plasterboard a hole about five feet tall and three wide had been knocked into the wall. Plaster dust covered the floor, and a piece of ragged wallpaper hung in shreds. They bent their heads and peered through into a small corridor, with ruined walls, electric leads hanging from the ceiling. Light filtered from an opening to their left, blocked by a padlocked iron gate. Somewhere inside water dripped. Beyond the gate they could see the beginnings of another room. Only the floor was visible, threadbare bits of carpet glued to the flaking underlay, a newspaper lying folded with the sports page face up. But in front of them the corridor extended into darkness.

Caffery crawled through the opening, giving the gate to the left an experimental push with his foot. He checked the padlock – fastened – dropped it and turned the other way, into the darkness. 'That's what he's done, the little shit. Dug his way into another flat.'

'Jesus.' Flea shivered. The air was damp, stagnant, like a long-closed cave and now, as she imagined a rats' nest of corridors, a maze, her heart wouldn't stop thumping. Quickly she ran her hands along the walls at shoulder height, sweeping for a light switch. Nothing. Just the daylight from the left and ahead the darkness. 'He must have—'

A shuffling noise was coming from the dark ahead. She leaned forward, trying to see into the room, her eyes pricking with fear. She could see a red light flashing on and off in there – not big, no more than a pinpoint – the size of a human iris. Something electronic, maybe. The sound came again and beads of sweat broke out in her armpits.

'Fuck it,' she muttered, stepping back into the bedroom, fumbling for her airwaves radio. She hit the emergency button and blocked out all other traffic. 'Bravo Control, bravo Control,' she hissed. 'Location is Hopewell estate, North West Tower, status zero, urgent assistance required. Suggest any attending units bring support unit bags and method-of-entry tools. And, uh . . .' She squinted down the corridor, which seemed to stretch right into the centre of the building. It made her blood run cold to think of it – Tig burrowing into the walls of his flat like a fucking termite. 'Yeah, tell them to contain the building from all sides. It's Sitexed so bring a Scott pack too.'

She signed off and turned to Caffery, who was standing in the opening, his back to the wall. Beyond him the red light was flashing on and off, illuminating the edge of his face. He was shaking his head.

'What is it?' she mouthed.

'You're going to wait for them?' he whispered.

'Yes.' She shifted the vest so that it rested on her pelvic bones and her breasts were more comfortable. 'Risk assessment,' she murmured. 'I've done one, and that's my decision.'

'And how far into the fucking building do you think he's gone?'

She knew what Caffery was saying. She knew where he was going with this. 'I don't care how far he's gone.'

'But you care if he's getting out the other fucking side,' he hissed.

'I care about doing my job and about me coming out the other side. It's basic training, one oh one – no light, we don't know what's in there and I'm not putting my life at risk. You might be in a hurry to die, but I'm not.'

With her last sentence the light reflected in Caffery's eyes became a little harder. He opened his mouth to say something, but seemed to change his mind. He looked back down the corridor, then at her, and for a moment she thought he was going in on his own. But he didn't. Instead he took a step back into the room and reached for her. For the second time that day she flinched, as if he was about to hurt her. But he was reaching to unsnap a holder on her body armour, to pull out the grey canister of CS gas. Then he put his lips very close to her ear. The hairs across her neck were stirred by his breath. 'Now that,' he whispered, 'is the biggest lie I've ever heard come out of another human being's mouth.'

Flea went very still. She watched him step away from her into the corridor, the eerie on-off, on-off of the red light in the dark room sparking round his outline. She could feel the small muscles in her jaw moving as she pictured Bushman's Hole, remembered letting Thom go down. She thought about the dark water, of what he was thinking when he saw Mum and Dad heading into the blackness, and a sensation like air rushed through her, like something rising up from inside her and cracking. She slammed the mobile into the Velcro fastening on the vest and caught up with Caffery in the corridor, laying a hand on his shoulder.

'Listen,' she hissed, narrowing her eyes, straining to see into the dark room ahead. 'The gas. Only use it if you have to – this place is too enclosed. You use it and we'll all get some of it and then we really will be waiting for the cavalry.' She ran her left hand across the pockets, checking everything was there – the Quikcuffs, the radio. She yanked the knife from inside the back of her trousers and handed it to him. 'They'll be expecting us at head or chest height. So we go in low.'

She pushed past him and dropped to a squat in the doorway, side on. Caffery was close behind her. She heard him drop too, then the in and out of his breath near her neck, but in front there was only silence – the shuffling had stopped. She tried to stretch her eyes into the room, her head automatically reeling off everything she was supposed to think about – the shape of the room, the position of the target, what her objective was – knowing that none of it would make any sense, that here her training counted for nothing.

'You go left, I'll go right. On three.' She unsnapped the ASP – the heavy, neoprene-covered expandable steel tube – and squeezed it, the weight in her hand reassuring. Keep it unracked for now. It was just as effective and wouldn't get in the way at ground height. 'One, two, three.'

She went into the room in an undignified scramble, half rolling, half crab-running, one hand in front of her face. About four feet inside, her trainers slid on something, sending her skidding forward. Her knee made contact with a hard edge and she felt something brush her face as her elbow slammed into the floor. The tumble stopped. She'd hit a wall, was lying on her side with her back against it, her heart hammering in her chest. She took a moment or two to get her breath back then, with an effort, manoeuvred herself on to her side, pushing herself up.

'Stop.' Caffery's voice came from somewhere in the darkness. 'I can see something. Don't move until I find the fucking light.'

She froze, on her knees, her elbows locked under her, her hair hanging round her face.

'I mean it. Don't stand up.'

Trembling, sweat running down her arms, she listened to him moving around in the darkness. There was a smell here – something familiar, coppery and dead – and when she turned back towards the entrance something about the light, the way it was chopped short, gave her the weird idea that she was enclosed – that somehow she'd rolled under something. There was a sound too, it dawned on her. A sound, under and above the noise Caffery was making finding a light switch. A dripping, thick and unpleasant.

'What's going on?' she hissed. She didn't want to think too hard about that dripping sound. 'What're you doing?'

There was a silence. Then Caffery released his breath and everything was flooded with bluish-white light. Flea blinked, her brain taking a moment to make sense of the shapes and colours, and when it did it was as if all the air had been knocked out of her. She began to pant, low and hard.

'Oh, fuck,' she heard Caffery say. 'Fuck fuck fuck.'

The good thing about not having much to live for, was that you stopped caring.

It had crept up easily on Caffery, this resilience to all that was wrong in the world, until it was as natural as opening his eyes in the morning and yawning when he was tired. So it was strange that day on the Hopewell estate, scrabbling along the walls trying to find a light, tearing his hands on exposed plaster and brickwork, to feel a moment's trepidation, a brief pulse of unease just before he put on the light. It lasted only a few seconds. Then he'd found the switch, the room was illuminated, and he saw what they'd been sharing the darkness with.

The room was about as big as Baines's bedroom, but from the patterned lino on the floor and the marks round the walls where cabinets might have stood, he guessed it had once been a kitchen. The wallpaper had been pink-striped before the mould and the bad air had eaten into it and it contained only two pieces of furniture: a sofa to his left and a table, which was pushed up against the wall, with Flea under it.

He got a snapshot of her – of the way she didn't really understand what was happening. She was kneeling frozen and shocked, blood on her arms and on her T-shirt, her hands planted on the ground, eyes swivelled to him, waiting for him to tell her what to do. She couldn't see what lay on the table above her. A body, on its back: bare-chested, jeans, a leather belt securing it at the waist.

Caffery knew who it was. Even without stepping forward, he knew it was Jonah. And that he hadn't been dead long. The blood pooling under the table hadn't begun to congeal. It was still dribbling slightly out of the hacked-out hole in his neck, dripping into a plastic measuring jug under the table and spilling over the top on to the floor. Once Tig had made the first cut into Jonah's neck there was only one way it was going to end. He'd tried to cut Jonah's head off and would have succeeded if he hadn't been interrupted. He'd wadded towels round the boy's chest to soak up the overflow and put more under his buttocks, maybe in case his bowels opened.

'It's him.' Under the table in her peculiar freeze-frame, Flea had seen the jug, the blood pooling round it. 'It's him,' she muttered. Slowly she raised her eyes to the underside of the table. 'Isn't it? It's Jonah.'

Caffery looked over to where a video-camera on a tripod was tilted down at the body, its record light flashing on and off. He's dead, he told himself, trying to force himself to scan the rest of the room, to see beyond the horror on the table. There's fuck all you can do. You don't know him. Get your priorities right. Forget Jonah and find the bastard who did it.

Flea grunted and scrambled out, like a dog, from under the table. '
Christ Christ Christ
,' she said, when she saw the body. '
Fucking Christ
.' Slipping in the blood she got to her feet, her hands out tense at her sides, staring at the body.

'Sssh,' Caffery said, trying to work out where the noise had come from. '
Be quiet
.'

He went to the sofa, put one hand on the back, leaned over and saw instantly what he was looking for. From waist height down, another hole had been dug into the wall. He dragged the sofa back and tried to listen, but behind him Flea was talking to herself, breathing hard.

'Ssh,' he whispered. 'I need you to be quiet, for fuck's sake.' It had been cut out with an angle-grinder, maybe, or a hacksaw. A dim blue light, daylight perhaps, was filtering on to the floor. 'Be quiet. This is it.'

When she didn't answer he turned. She was still at the table. She'd planted her feet solid and wide, had pulled Jonah's head back and had her hands locked together on his chest, squeezing down on him, each compression pushing a half-hearted dribble of blood out of his neck.

'
Christ!
Stop that.'

But she went on pumping.

'Hey.' He came back from the sofa and grabbed her arm. 'He's dead. Now stop the fuck what you're doing.'

She froze, her hands on Jonah's chest. Her face was grey, her pupils dilated.

'Remember what we're doing,' he growled. 'Remember.'

'What?' she murmured, her mouth moving slowly.

'Fuck's sake. Keep with me, Sergeant Marley.' He dug his fingers into her arm. 'Keep with me. We've got to get going.'

She turned her eyes to the sofa, the gap behind it. Then she looked back at the corpse. He was about to shake her, when something in her face changed. Her forehead creased, and she seemed to snap back into herself.

'Yes,' she said, wiping her bloodied hands on her vest. She bent down, put both hands on her thighs and breathed fast through her mouth. 'Yeah, I'm OK. Let's do it.'

Caffery held up the CS canister in front of his face, the knife in his other hand, and ducked into the gap. It opened into a small passage with a similar gap cut at the other end. This one had a gate welded into it, like the one they'd seen before, but it stood open.

He scrambled towards it, squat-walking, the hand with the knife hitting the floor at every other step. For a moment Flea wasn't with him – she was still in the room getting a grip on herself – but before he reached the end of the passage she'd caught up and he could feel her breathing behind him. For some reason he remembered something in the files from the Met – that the Tokoloshe could become invisible if it put a pebble in its mouth – and had to check over his shoulder that it really was her behind him. And it was. Her eyes were shining, her small face set and determined.

At the far wall they stopped in crouches by the gap, and listened again. On the other side of this wall someone was breathing, hot, panicky breaths.

'Three-sixty sweep,' she mouthed.

'What?'

'We do a three-sixty sweep. Check the room.'

He copied her, turning slightly to the side in the crouch, pressing his left hand on the inside of the wall and mirroring her by pushing his right foot ahead of him into the opening. 'Now,' she whispered. '
Now
.'

Holding the CS gas and the ASP in front of them, they craned their necks and scanned the room fast. It was small – there were two other doorways in it and a boarded-up window – and filthy, full of flies and used food containers. On a sofa pushed up against the opposite wall sat two men, one skeletal and white, one short and black.

'Police!' Caffery yelled, pointing the CS gas into the room. 'Police!' The two men shrank into each other. One was the guy they'd chased, the little witch doctor in the jacket; the other – Caffery didn't have to see the stumps of his arms to know that it was Mallows. Alive. They'd cut off his hands. They'd taken his blood. And he was still alive. The fucking Crime Scene Manager. He'd been right, the bastard.

'Hey – you,' Caffery said. 'Mallows? Ian Mallows?'

Mossy tried to raise his filthy, bandaged arms, but the effort seemed to half kill him. He sat there, gazing at Caffery with heavy eyes. 'How d'you know my name?'

'How do you think I know your fucking name? You all right?'

'No, I'm fucking not.'

'Well stay there. I mean it. Don't move.'

'Do I look like I'm going anywhere?' He wiped his nose on his shoulder. 'Jesus,' he muttered. 'Jesus fucking Christ.'

'You,' Caffery shouted at the black guy. 'You. Why did you run? Eh?'

'I'm sorry, sir.' He put his hands up, cringing. 'I'm sorry.'

Caffery waved the canister at him. 'Get up – off the sofa. Against the wall.
Move it
.' He did as he was told, dropping down off the sofa like a child, making Caffery think of what the waitress in the restaurant had said:
He was so tiny . . . He'd of
only come up to here
. 'Against that wall. That's it – stay there. Hands where I can see them. Spread them against the wall.'

Caffery stepped into the room and straightened. Flea came after him and they stood, both instinctively with their backs against the wall, holding out their weapons, eyes darting around.

'Where is he?' Flea said. 'Baines? Where's he gone?'

'Eh?'

'Where's Baines? Where is he?'

Mossy half raised his head, his eyes rolling. 'In the bathroom,' he said, as if he couldn't give a shit any more. As if the police being here to rescue him was an inconvenience that might go away if he was patient. He gave a vague wave in the direction of the window.

Caffery turned and realized they must have come all the way through to the back of the building. The boarded window was in an unlit corridor that led towards the side of the tower block. Outside he heard distant, wavery sirens. The other support-unit serials arriving. Flea's eyes were watery. He knew what she was thinking. Did they have to go into the bathroom or could they just stay there and wait for the other units?

'Is there a way out of the bathroom?' Caffery snapped at the witch-doctor guy. 'A window – another door?'

'I don't know. Maybe a window.'

'Shit,' he muttered. 'Shit, oh, shit, oh, shit. There would be a window, wouldn't there?'

In a previous life, before it had been boarded up by the council, this had been a bedroom – a woman's, from the ornate plastic wardrobe in the corner. The door into the bathroom, shabby now, the veneer peeling off it, still had the crystal-cut glass handle that must have once been someone's pride and joy.

Flea and Caffery stood in the corridor. Flea had her back to the wall, alongside the boarded-up window. She took her eyes off the door, bent slightly, craning her neck up under the grille, peering through the gap where the corrugated-iron covering had been ripped back, seeing the cars parked outside. She pulled her head out again and looked back at the room they'd come from: the hole wasn't big enough for Tig to get through, but the little black guy, he could make it through if he wanted. She should have handcuffed him to Mallows or shut him in a cupboard. Too late now. The sirens were louder – the first of the support-unit serials would be pulling up outside.

'Ready?' Caffery mouthed.

She nodded, remembering a protocol she'd once trained in: the 'deranged-man' tactic. It needed at least three officers with shields, not just her and Caffery sharing one person's equipment. Fuck only knew what would happen, but she racked the ASP anyway, flicking it up and bringing it to rest on her shoulder. 'OK,' she murmured. 'Give it a hoof.'

He smiled at her sideways, ironic. Then he aimed his foot at the door. It flew open and they threw themselves forward, Caffery first, then Flea, coming in too fast behind him, half tripping, righting herself by putting a hand on his arm, getting balanced and snapping into the combat position: weight low, knees unlocked, presenting her side, left hand in front of her face.

And then what happened was nothing. Silence. They blinked a bit, their faces yellow in the dim light from the grille on the window. It wasn't like any bathroom either of them had seen. A St Andrew's cross had been welded with workmanlike durability on to the cracked tiles above the bath, and where the toilet had once been there was a powder-coated, galvanized-steel cage that stood tall enough for an average man to get into but not to stand up in. Otherwise the bathroom was empty. No hidey-holes, no exits. Nothing could have got through that tiny window.

'Fuck,' Caffery said, dropping the knife wearily. 'Lying little shits.'

'Listen,' Flea said, catching his arm, looking back at the boarded-up window in the corridor. If the skinny guy tried to climb through it he'd see him, and if he'd already tried going back through the flats he'd be mopped up by the serials coming round the front. But Tig – Tig could be anywhere. 'I think he's still somewhere in here,' she said. 'There's another door out of that room, leading back into the middle of the flat. Let's go back in and, if they're still there, I target the black guy. 'K?'

He turned to her. For a split second their faces were so close she could see details of his skin. 'OK,' he said. 'Yeah – OK.'

'Right,' she said, holding up a finger. 'When I count to five, we're going to do it. Yes?'

'Yes.'

'One. Two. Three. Four . . .'

The words died in her throat. She went still. Very still. A drop of water had appeared on Caffery's shoulder, a perfect, clear, tear-shaped drop on his white shirt – and for a moment she couldn't do anything but stare at it, while the drop ran down and spilled on to his chest. He watched it, too, then raised his eyes to hers. Neither spoke, because they knew, even before they turned their eyes upwards, what they'd see.

He was above them. Hanging from D-rings bored into the ceiling, spreadeagled, sweating and trembling with the effort of holding himself in place. Dressed only in black combats, his body glistened with sweat and blood. His mouth was open, his teeth were bared and the blood pooling in his bad white eye made it bulge out at them. An avenging angel.

Flea felt a sound coming into her throat, a voice in her head screaming,
You didn't follow your
training, you effing idiot
, and she had time to think,
The 360-degree sweep should take in the
ceiling too
. And then Tig was falling from the ceiling like a hawk, nails outstretched, landing with a sickening crack on Caffery's shoulders. His knife and the CS gas spun away across the floor and the two men tumbled backwards on to the tiles, colliding with the bath panel, coming to a stop against the wall on their sides, facing each other like lovers, grappling at faces, ears and hair.