Mo Hayder - Ritual

'Kaiser?'

'No. It's Mandy. What's going on?'

'Mandy.'

'Yes — Mandy. Look, Flea, I've been trying his phone all night and he's either got it switched off or he's rejecting my calls. I need to talk to him.'

Flea scratched her scalp hard, trying to think. 'Wait a moment.' She put the phone on the desk and went into the hallway. It was pitch black — she hadn't realized it had got so late. 'Thom?' she called into the darkness. 'Thom? Where are you?' She waited, counting to fifty in her head, then went back to the phone. 'Mandy, he's not answering. He must be in the shed or something. I'll get him to-'

'In the shed? It's nearly eleven o'clock — pitch dark out there. What's he doing?'

'I don't know. I'll tell him to call you when he-'

'But you said you'd ask him to call hours ago. Why is he lying to me?'

'He's not lying.'

'Are you sure? Because if he's lying to me I'll kill him.' Flea took a breath to answer but Mandy spoke again. 'I mean it,' she said. 'I'll kill him if he's lying to me.'

Flea stood up straight, looking out into the darkness, at the garden she and Thom had played in as children. Something had snapped in her head. 'You know what, Mandy?' she said, her voice cold. 'You can fuck off and leave him alone. He'll call you when he's ready.'

And she hung up, hands shaking, head racing. She fished the keys out of her pocket and was heading to the door when a car's headlights filled the living room from the front. She went to the side room and pulled back the curtain: the Focus was turning into the driveway, going to the back of the house. Thom. At last.

Feeling weak now, she went to the back door and unlocked it. There were so many things to say to him she didn't know where she would start.

At first she didn't realize anything was wrong, even when she saw how fast the car was sweeping down the driveway. Even as she watched him bring it to a halt in a spray of gravel, throw it into gear and reverse it quickly under a spreading juniper, she wasn't thinking about something being wrong with him. She was thinking about what she'd seen on the Web. It was only when he pushed past her, tearing off his coat, going straight into the house and into the toilet, that she understood he was crying.

She stood in the doorway and watched him run the tap, putting his face under it, gulping air, his whole body trembling. From behind her came the sound of another car outside, another pair of headlights sweeping round the side of the house.

'It's the police.' He straightened, took a towel from the shelf and rubbed his eyes with it. 'Police.' He sniffed. 'B-been following me since the A36.'

Flea saw from its headlights that the car had stopped outside the back door. 'The police ?' she murmured, as if it was a word she'd never heard before. This was so unreal. 'What do they want?'

'Oh, shit,' Thom said. He bundled the towel to his eyes, held it there tight.

'Thom?' Slowly her thoughts were coming back. 'Thom — what's been…?' A horrible thought crossed her mind. She snatched at the towel, got him to lower it. His face was thick and red, his eyes bloodshot, his breath sour. 'Jesus, Thom.' He tried to turn away, ashamed, but she held his wrist so he had to look at her. 'Thom? How many have you had? You stink of it. Are you stupid ?'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' He moved his head around miserably. 'It's just all gone wrong — all gone so bloody wrong-'

Behind them in the hall the doorbell rang. A dark shape was there, smudged and distorted by the coloured glass. Flea stared blankly at it.

'Please talk to him,' Thom said agitatedly. 'Please, please, Flea, get him to go away. I'll never ask you another favour, I promise.' He grabbed her arm. ' Please ,' he hissed, a note of fear in his voice. 'Make him leave us alone. Quickly.'

In the study the phone was ringing again. Mandy, probably. Outside, the policeman knocked again, then rang. Flea closed her eyes, counted to twenty — trying to bring something calm into her head. She took a breath and pushed her hair behind her ears.

'It's OK,' she said. 'Just go upstairs.'

'I'm so sorry.' He was crying again. 'I really am sorry.'

She turned him towards the stairs, moving him easily because she'd always been so much stronger than he was. 'Go into the back room. Pretend to be asleep.'

The doorbell rang again and the police officer put his hand on to the glass, trying to peer inside. She waited for Thom to climb the stairs, his head hanging, the soles of his cheap shoes muddy and worn as he got higher and higher. Then, heart thudding, she went to the door and opened it.

It was one of the lads from the traffic unit based in her building at Almondsbury. She knew him instantly, sometimes spoke to him at the chocolate machine buying Mars bars. He was square, with a receding hairline that had left a dark V-shape on the top of his head, like a widow's peak. Prody, his name was, or something like it, but they all called him the Motorway Monkey, because he spent his time squaring off to boy-racers on the M5.

'Look,' he said, and she could see he was trying to calm himself by the way he was breathing. Had to keep stopping between words. 'I wouldn't do this, but by the time I'd done a PNC and I knew it was yours, I'd got myself so wound up I had to keep on your tail and-' He broke off, staring at her incredulously. 'You didn't stop. Why didn't you stop?'

Flea stood quite still, struggling to grab the sense of this. Beyond him she could see the silver Ford Focus, parked hurriedly with its back in the bushes, the light in the cottage porch reflected in its windscreen. The police cruiser stood with its nose a few feet away from the window of the living room, its door open wide. She wondered how much he'd seen of her and Thom.

'I was… I was in a hurry.'

'A hurry?'

'Yes — I mean, you know, the old excuse…' She put out her hand to indicate the toilet door open, the light on. 'Really needed — you know. It's no excuse, but…'

'You were driving, then? It was you?' He was wiping his forehead. 'I couldn't see from behind — I had an idea it was someone else in there, the way you were throwing it round those bends. Didn't you see me? We could've killed ourselves.'

There were a few moments' silence while he studied her face. There was something twitchy about him and she knew he was angry. She tried to close off her expression, to imagine a veil coming down behind her eyes, hiding the liar in there. She concentrated on the V on his forehead, imagining herself boring a hole into it with her eyes.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but I'm going to have to do it by the book.'

'By the book? But I'm-'

'I've started a log now, see. At Control. They've got your index, they've got you down as driving without due care and attention. They're on standby now and if I go back and cancel it after all I've told them it's going to look pretty fucking sus.'

She sighed. She gazed up at the stars, thinking, there is no end to this. 'Shit,' she said, standing back and holding the door open. She unzipped her coat. 'OK. You'd better come in.'

Flea stood in the cluttered little kitchen, with the familiar things around her, and tried to quieten her thoughts. There was so much to think about. Why was Kaiser so bloody stupid about answering his phone? Kaiser , she thought, I need to speak to you .

The kettle was boiling, and she poured the water into the teapot wondering how far Thom had wound Prody up. He was the type of cop who, when he'd decided to 'do it by the book', didn't know where to stop. If he was really pissed off he might even ask for a breathalyser. And there was the ibogaine. The fucking ibogaine. It might play a trick on her and make it come up positive. ' Stupid ,' she hissed. Breathalysers only tested for alcohol, but she didn't know the science, and what if — what if the ibogaine triggered something, a chemical reaction, maybe?