Ritual (8 page)

'Don't need to ask what this is about.' The council sub-contractors, three men in bright red jackets marked SITA, were manoeuvring their inflatable raft against the edge of the pontoon, one of them assembling a jetting machine, snapping on the jet head to the orange flexipipe. One was holding his finger under the drain, watching the steady dribble of water on to it while his colleague was testing the jet. 'Only question is, how far up.'

Caffery was on the pontoon, looking down thoughtfully at the handfuls of sludge Flea'd pulled out of the drain. 'You what?'

The contractor was a big red-faced man with a shaved head and three piercings in his right ear. 'He's blocked, isn't he? The drain. See, a trickle like this on a sunny day and it means 'e's blocked somewhere.'

'How far up?'

'Wales?' He laughed. 'Cardiff? Don't worry. When we hit it you'll be the first to know.'

As they inserted the jet head Caffery studied the entrance to the drain and the long green tail of slime under it. Then he peered at the stuff on the pontoon between his feet. It was black, but ever since it had been pulled out he'd been thinking of the fatty white residue that had been clogging up Dennis Nilsen's drains back in the nineteen eighties. Everyone in the Met knew that story – the story of what the drain people had found. Human fat, as it turned out, from the sixteen bodies Nilsen had dismembered in his bedsit, boiled and flushed down the toilet.

'Figured out where the drain comes from yet?' he asked Flea. She had showered in the Station and was dressed in a navy fleece and combats, and now she was kneeling on the pontoon, inspecting the blueprint they'd had biked over from the Environment Agency. He came and crouched next to her, trying not to be conscious of the way the air changed near her, the way the smell of the drains was replaced by baby lotion and toothpaste.

'Where do these things lead?'

'Some of the drains let into the harbour, some into underground rivers – the Frome, or the moat – but just to confuse things some let back into the sewer system.' She gestured downstream to where the Clifton Suspension Bridge stood cold and remote, spanning the dark gorge. The contractors turned on the sluice and dirty water gushed out of the opening, splashing into the harbour, moving the boat round with its force. She raised her voice above the noise. 'The pumping station for the northern interceptor is right over there. Just up under the bridge.'

'The northern what?'

'One of the sewage systems. We've got two in Bristol – one's the southern ring, the other's in the north. We're on the north one here. But that doesn't mean anything because most of the storm-drain system is separate, like in most cities. This one . . .' She ran a finger along the route shown. It led from the harbour back past the restaurant entrance, terminating about three metres further along, by the road. There was one open drain cover shown at its head. 'This one's not connected underground.' She tapped the map at the head of the drain. 'It only looks it because it's flowing in that direction.'

'We're there,' shouted one of the men on the boat. 'We've found him.' Caffery and Flea looked up. The contractor with the earring was holding the jet hose above his head, both hands on it, eyes narrowed, face turned away from the water that was fountaining out, soaking everything. 'Got him.'

'What've you got?' Caffery came forward, shouting above the sound of the water. 'Do you know what it is?'

'Can't tell,' he yelled back. 'It's a long way up – ten metres at least. We're going to have to have a look inside.'

Caffery watched Dundas assemble the search unit's drain cam: a gyroscopically mounted camera on a wheeled probe. It was attached by a fifty-metre cable to a portable screen zipped inside a yellow waterproofed casing and when the contractors had moved their boat out of the way and the dive team had manoeuvred their launch into position, Flea began carefully to insert the camera head into the hole.

She switched on the remote-control toggle, and the wheeled camera trundled off on its long journey into the drain. There was silence as everyone watched the screen, the only sound the squeak of the cable winding gently off the spool. The camera had two lights mounted on it and the picture was in full colour – an eerie, twisting journey into the earth, brushed by hanging knots of plant roots, passing through the blinding whiteness of sunlight from an overhead grille, water sloshing over the lens. There had been drains in the railway banks at the back of Caffery's house that the police had searched for Ewan's body and Caffery had problems with drains to this day.

'Lookit that,' murmured one of the contractors, studying the inside of the drain. 'Bloody thing's cracked to buggery. Radials everywhere.'

Flea worked slowly, glancing back and forth between the drainage charts, the screen and the entrance to the drain. 'That's five metres,' she said, checking the read-out on the monitor. 'And what? You hit something at ten?'

'Ten and a half.'

They lapsed into silence, the team glued to the screen, expecting at any minute the camera to turn a corner and the screen to be filled with an image.

Maybe everyone was expecting to see something different, but for Caffery it was eyes. All through his childhood he'd lie awake at night, thinking of the railway cutting outside his bedroom window, wondering where Penderecki had buried Ewan. He always pictured Ewan on his back, his face turned upwards, so even now he expected the eyes to come first, looming out of the darkness, the light hardly reflecting off flat, dried-out corneas.

'Nine,' Flea murmured. 'Nine and a half. Ten. Ten and a . . .'

She stopped the camera. The screen had filled with an image. Everyone crowded round, hardly breathing.

'What's that?' murmured Caffery.

It wasn't the distorted body part everyone had in their heads. It took them a moment or two to see what it was instead: an accumulation of rock, silt, root and soil.

'That's your blockage,' she said.

'Looks like a fall,' said one of the contractors. 'You've had a cave-in there.'

'Can you get past it?'

'Think so.' She was toggling the controls. On screen the camera head lunged into the rock, climbed and fell. 'If I can just . . .' She made three attempts at it. On the fourth the little remote camera climbed to the top of the fall and trundled down the other side into standing water. The picture got blurry under water, the lights picking up swirls of silt. On it went, Flea stopping it to inspect every anomaly, swivelling the camera head at every crack or bump. After about five minutes it butted up against a blank wall and came to a stop.

'What's that?'

She shook her head. 'The end?' she suggested.

Then, a little surprised, 'There's nothing.' There was a short, disappointed silence. Flea let the camera nose up against the wall, turned it, let it make a final inspection of the fall from the opposite side. But nothing. The length of the drain behind the fall was clear. She switched off the camera, and the image on screen died, dwindling to a point.

'Oh, well,' said Dundas. He put his hand on Flea's back. 'It was about the only half-logical explanation anyone could have come up with.'

'Yeah.' She shrugged. 'I suppose. Even so . . .' Biting her lip, she spooled in the camera, setting it into reverse mode, lights off.

The sub-contractors began to disband, a little disappointed not to have seen a dead body rammed into a drain, a horror story to tell their mates in the pub. Only Caffery didn't move. He was standing quite still, his thoughts racing, staring at the blank screen. Something was ticking away, something that had to do with direction and intent, and the sudden conviction that whoever was responsible for cutting off the hand had never intended it to end up in the harbour. He turned to the harbour wall, trying to estimate the distance from the opening to the surface. About five feet, he reckoned.

'Hey,' he said to Flea. 'The camera was going up, wasn't it? On an incline?'

'Yes. Because the drain is at a pitch. Why?'

He picked up the chart and studied it. 'How deep does the drain run? Can we follow the path overground?'

She stopped winding in the camera and glanced dubiously at the chart in his hands. 'It depends how accurate that is. S'pose you could put ground-probing radar on it, but that's a trip to HQ for us.'

'Come on, then.' He stepped off the pontoon. 'Let's give the chart a try.'

'But there's nothing in the drain,' she called from behind, putting down the control and coming after him. 'I covered it all. I didn't miss a thing.'

'Didn't say you did, Sergeant. Didn't say you did.'

Caffery bunched the map in his hand, so he could see the dotted line, and headed up the quayside, out through the privacy screens to where one or two people hovered inquisitively next to the unit van, its Underwater Search sign an open invitation to every ghoul in the city.

'Hey,' Flea was saying breathlessly, hurrying to keep pace with him, 'don't worry. I'm not going to cry about being wrong, you know.'

He halted a few feet from the restaurant and she stopped next to him. There was a pause. Then, at exactly the same time, some instinct made them both look down. They were standing at either side of a puddle that stretched round the drain grille between their feet. There was a moment's silence while they considered the puddle, wondered what it meant.

'This was here yesterday,' she said, staring at her feet, at her regulation boots just touching the edge of the water. 'I got my shoes wet in it.'

'Because the drain's blocked. It's not draining away.' Caffery looked at the cobbles that stretched to the stairs leading into the restaurant entrance. If he was reading the chart right, this grille was at the head of the drain. From here it ran back towards the harbour in a straight line. About two metres from where they stood it would have to run under an area cordoned off by timber palings where the dumpsters were. He followed the imaginary line back, going round the palings until he came to the opening.

'What're you doing?'

He held up his hand to quiet her and stepped round the fence into the enclosure. There was a smell here, flies gathering round the piled-up bin-liners bulging with waste from the kitchens. A dozen or so crates of empty beer bottles stood against the steps up to fire doors leading into the kitchen. He pushed away one of the dumpsters and used his foot to move the bin-liners, clearing the ground in the direction of the entrance. At the wall, where the drain must have run briefly under the porch of the building, he stopped, peering down at what was between his feet.

'What're you—' Flea broke off when she saw what he was looking at. The last cobble, the one that should have met the underside of the steps, was missing. Others, surrounding it, had been cut, crudely, maybe with a pickaxe. 'Oh,' she said softly. 'I think I know what you're thinking.'

'Yeah. I reckon we're standing right over the cave-in. Don't you?'

And so the team discovered that not one but two hands had been buried under the entrance to the Moat restaurant. Whoever had done it had dug a fraction too deep, making the earth give way, dropping one hand into the drain below from where it was carried out into the harbour. The second, covered with earth and debris, had hung on – it was lodged precariously above the cave-in, its fingers stretched out above the water. Just out of view of Flea's camera.

It wasn't as if Caffery'd never seen a severed hand – if there was one thing he'd been around the block with it was the mutilation of the human body and he'd known more distressing combinations of the way the familiar can become the unfamiliar than he cared to remember. In fact, he really wasn't sure why finding a second human hand buried under the entrance to the Moat was giving him this apprehensive little buzz.

Overnight his head had kept going back to the waitress at the Station, her voice sounding as if she didn't expect to be believed: subdued and sort of pleading, knowing what she was saying was a bit weird, a bit sick. He'd dreamed of shadows, of things moving around at waist height. He'd got a HOLMES operator in Kingswood to search the force network for flashers in the area and a list had come back not in tens but in hundreds. It could take weeks – and there was nothing concrete to which he could connect this character exposing himself – not to the case and certainly not to what had happened with Keelie in the car last night. So why did he keep making those links?

But it didn't matter how illogically his head was behaving, he knew enough about the system to appear at least to be doing things methodically. The owner of the restaurant was out of the country on holiday – Caffery had someone trying to track him down – but the rest of the staff had begun to arrive for work and were taken aback to be stopped at the entrance and led across to the Station to be interviewed. Caffery had taken all the core team off door-to-dooring the marina so now almost all his manpower was in there, sitting at tables in the restaurant drinking bitter-smelling black coffee from tiny cups. The place looked like a job centre, interviewer and interviewee gazing intently at one another across the tables. On top of the usual questions, he'd told each investigator to ask if anyone had seen anything unexpected on the pontoon late at night, after the place closed.

Caffery stood at the side of the restaurant, waiting for the CSI team to unearth the hand – they were doing it as slowly as archaeologists so that no evidence was lost. The sun had crossed the harbour, and in the distance you could see it sparkling on the masts in the marina, but close up the pontoon was dark and cold-looking. Somehow he couldn't picture the sun on it, whatever time of day it was. The police search adviser, the POLSA, had set up parameters, and teams from Portishead had been bussed in to comb the restaurant, using ground-probing radar and scanning the quayside around the Moat while the sub-contractors rodded every drain in the area. But everyone was coming up empty. They still couldn't find the rest of the body.

The CSM thought it was very funny, the way they were all knocking themselves out. 'Call yourself a detective?' he said, placing the hand in an evidence bag and coming up to Caffery. He was a little man, with a pinched nose and red bags under his eyes, expressionless and grey, and if Caffery had to guess he wouldn't place him as city. He'd place him as coming from one of those ribbon towns south-west of Bristol he had to drive through to get home. Nailsea maybe.

'I'm sorry?' Caffery said, looking down at the grey flesh in the bag. 'What did you say?'

The CSM regarded him with his slightly runny eyes. 'I said, "Call yourself a detective?" I thought the idea of being a detective was never to make assumptions.'

'What am I assuming?'

'That there's a corpse.'

'Look, I know this sounds stupid, but if there's a hand – two hands – there has to be a corpse.'

The CSM snapped the bag closed and ran his nail across the top to seal it, then initialled and dated it. 'I'm not a doctor, mind, but you pick things up in my job and,' he said, placing the bag in a polystyrene cool box, 'the simple laws of physics and biomedicine tell us that a severed hand does not necessarily turn a human body into a corpse.'

'You mean this guy might still be
alive
?'

The CSM fumbled in his case and pulled out a bundle of pens wrapped in a piece of red elastic. He unpicked the knot and let them clatter back into the case. 'See this?' He held up the elastic. 'This is the human artery.'

'OK. Whatever you say,' Caffery said patiently.

The CSM fumbled for a Stanley blade in a plastic container. 'You know how suicides get it wrong.' He ran a hand at right angles across the elastic. 'Slash their wrists this way.'

'Yeah. Doesn't work.'

'If they did it lengthways . . .' He made a longitudinal cut in the elastic. A few ends frayed but the elastic remained in one piece. '. . . they'd make a better job of it – cut an artery like this and it keeps bleeding – out of here. It's still intact so it can keep pumping blood. But cut it completely this way . . .' He laid the elastic on the wooden railing at the edge of the deck, sliced across it horizontally with a bit of effort and held it up, twisting and writhing, '. . . and it springs back, up into the arm like this.' He gave the nylon a tug and it jumped in the air like a live eel. 'Stops the blood pumping, seals the whole circuit off. One pleased patient. Or, rather, not pleased, if it was intended to be a suicide.'

In the distance, above the sun-tipped buildings of Bristol, dusty old flocks of birds rose in the blue. Caffery watched them thoughtfully. 'You mean,' he said, 'there's someone out there? Someone walking around with no hands?'

The CSM snorted. 'Now, I didn't say he'd be
walking around
, did I? But I didn't say he'd be a corpse either. Anyway . . .' He caught up the elastic and shovelled it back into his case. '. . . I'm only here to release this bloody thing to Southmeads. I'm not the pathologist and I'm certainly not the detective. In fact, you know what?'

'What?'

'The detective part? There's a rumour going round that's
you
, Mr Caffery.'