Mo Hayder - Ritual

'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.'