Mo Hayder - Ritual

Mabuza lowered the handkerchief. 'You've been into my financial details?'

'You gave us permission to search the house.'

'I didn't give you permission to do that.'

'You sponsor at least fifty voluntary drugs-counselling groups.' Caffery sat forward. 'It's not negligible what you spend on them. Ian Mallows attended drugs charities. Heroin was his problem. Did you know that?'

'What issue is it to you who I give my money to?'

'You don't maintain your contact with the charities because they're a good source of victims, then? Vulnerable people? People who won't be missed?'

Mabuza pocketed the handkerchief and stood. He was thin and small but there was a fierceness in his face that made him seem momentarily bigger. 'I didn't touch that boy. I don't know how his hands came to be where they were, and I didn't touch him.' He jerked his jacket off the chair and began to pull it on. 'It's time for me to go.'

'Please, please. Sit down. I don't want this going up another level — not while we're all ramped up like this.'

But Mabuza was buttoning his jacket, pulling the sleeves straight with furious movements. 'You've insulted me. It's time for me to go.'

Caffery placed his hands palm down on the table and said very quietly: 'If you try to go, I'll have to arrest you.'

Mabuza stopped, the jacket half buttoned. In the corner the officer was on his feet, ready to make a move. 'I beg your pardon, sir?' Mabuza said. 'What did you say?'

'I said I'll have no choice but to arrest you. Local businessman — sits on the school governors' board I heard? The local hacks would eat that up.' Mabuza stared. His lips began to look dark blue, as if his blood had stopped circulating.

'Or you can stay — we'll go on doing this nice and quietly, just you cooperating with us. No one need ever know.'

There was a long silence while Mabuza thought about this. Behind him the officer waited, his head on one side. Then Mabuza sank into his chair, his eyes fixed on the table as if he couldn't bear to raise them. When he spoke his voice was subdued. 'You know about my son?'

'No,' Caffery said honestly, opening his hands. 'No, we don't.' He surveyed the top of Mabuza's greying head. 'Why? Has he got a problem, your son? Is he an addict?'

'Was,' Mabuza said. 'He was an addict. He is recovered now, thank you.' He gave a deep sigh, as if his life was sometimes too much to bear. 'When we came to this country it was difficult for him. So difficult. The racism here isn't what we expected. Not from what we were told living in South Africa. It comes from places you never expect — the Caribbeans, Jamaicans, children from St Lucia, Trinidad, the ones my boy is with at school, the ones who look exactly the same as he does. My son, he is a good boy, very quiet. These boys he comes into contact with, they think it means they can bend him. And for a while they did.' Mabuza seemed to drift off for a bit, his head on one side, his face contracting at the memory. 'But someone helped him,' he went on. 'A drugs counsellor. If he hadn't my son would be dead today.'

Caffery didn't speak. His mood was slowly sinking. Yes, something about the son's story sounded a bit overlaid, a bit of a performance, but still the look in the guy's face, in his demeanour, told Caffery that the drugs-charities connection was a blind alley. The bank statements were a coincidence.

He got up, went to the window, and lifted the blind. It was mid-afternoon and schoolchildren were thronging the streets, pushing each other, jostling and laughing. When the search team had come up with the bank statements he'd immediately got two men together. They were out there now, revisiting some of the twenty or so charities on the statement. But now that felt like a bum steer, a waste of manpower, and the carpet fibres might be a better bet. One of the office staff had promised to come straight to the custody suite when they got any results from the lab on them. Maybe that was the thing to do: wait and hit Mabuza with the fibres. Sometimes there was a fax through at four in the afternoon. Another half an hour.

Just as he was about to turn back, the Walking Man's face came into Caffery's head. You're looking for death, Jack Caffery. You're looking for death . Caffery dropped the blind and rubbed his eyes, trying to get rid of the image. He turned and looked at Mabuza, who was hunched at the table, picking compulsively at the coffee cup again, little balls of polystyrene clinging electrostatically to his jacket sleeves. He's so nervous, Caffery thought, but what he doesn't realize is that none of this matters. Not really. It doesn't matter what happens or what we do with our lives because we're all dying. I'm dying and you're dying, Mabuza. You'll die and whatever you've done will die with you.

10 May

This is a hinterland of horror, a place of unspeakable, unnameable practices. A place where the bodies of missing male children turn up on wasteland near their villages skinned alive, their organs taken from them. A kidney fetches two hundred pounds, a heart four hundred. Your brains or your tackle can make up to four thousand.

'More for a child and more for a white man,' Skinny says. 'Him is more clever, white man. In business him is more successful than us.'

It takes Mossy a long time to accept what he's stumbled into. But slowly, slowly, he maps it out in his head. First, there is this place — it seems like the headquarters of the operation. Mossy has no idea about the exact location. All he can remember is getting out of the car and being led straight through a door, then through another and another. He's got no idea if he's still in Bristol, even. Second, he's worked out there are other people in the city who buy the things Uncle has taken from his victims — people from Africa, says Skinny, who live here and haven't forgotten their homeland beliefs. Third, there are the videos. They are taken by Uncle to record the pain. And this is what Mossy finds most difficult to get out of his head, because Skinny tells him the videos are not for Uncle alone.

Yes, it's true, part of Uncle's tastes are to enjoy seeing pain. But things don't stop there. The videos are a tool, screened as evidence for the customer, proof that the body parts were taken from a live victim because, and this part chills Mossy to the bone, the louder the screams the stronger the medicine …

'The blood we took from you,' Skinny admits one night. 'Him sell a little at a time. Some him's kept. In the fridge.'

'It's fucking disgusting,' Mossy says thickly. 'Fucking disgusting. What do they do with human blood? You fucking vampires.'

'Only keep it. Keep it to protect from the devils.'

'Devils?'

Skinny nods. His eyes are pinkish in the half-light. 'Uncle, he send a devil to scare everyone.' He gets up from the sofa and crouches next to the grating. He pulls through it a carrier-bag that's been sitting there all afternoon — something Mossy's seen but not really registered. Squatting, he unpacks it. Out come a wig, a pair of boots, and something smooth and shiny. Mossy thinks for a moment it's a limb — an arm, or something. But then Skinny holds it up and he sees what it is. It's made of wood: a long, smooth thing with a top carved to resemble someone's knob.

'What the fuck's that for?' he says, hiking himself up on one elbow. 'You're not bringing that thing near me.'

'No, no,' murmurs Skinny, turning it so that the light falls and slants on it. 'Not for that. It is for scare people, make them think it is the devil. Make them buy the blood.'

Mossy licks his lips and looks at the boots, the wig. 'What? Does he have you go out there wearing it? You strap it on and go out and give them a little show, do you? Is that how it works?'

But Skinny's not looking at Mossy. 'No,' he says eventually. 'Not me.'