Mo Hayder: Ritual

Caffery could hear the thickened clicking of the girl's breathing in her throat.

'He was naked — I saw that straight away.'

'He?'

'My boyfriend reckons it was some traveller's kid. Sometimes they find their way down to the banks of the Cut. You can see them from the road, camped behind the warehouses with their washing out. My boyfriend said a kid because he was so tiny. He'd of only come up to here.' She held out her hand in mid-air to indicate a height of just over a metre. 'And he was black. Really, y'know, jet black, which is why I can't see it. Can't see him being a pikey.'

'How old, then? Five? Six?'

But she was shaking her head. 'No. That's just it. That's just what I told my BF. He wasn't young. Not at all. I mean, he was small, like a kid. But he wasn't a child. I saw his face. Just a glimpse, but it was enough for me to see that he wasn't a child. He was a man,' she said. 'A weird, weird-looking man. That's what's so effing freaky about it — that's why I know you're not going to believe me. That and…'

'That and?'

'And what he was doing.'

'What was he doing?'

'Oh…' She fiddled with the ring again. Moved her head from side to side, not looking at him.

'Oh, you know…'

'No.'

'The usual — you know — what men do. Had his thing — you know.' She cupped her hand on the table. 'Had it out like this.' She gave an embarrassed laugh. 'But he wasn't just — you know, just some old wanker. I mean it must've been some kind of a trick, because this thing he had… it must have been something he'd strapped on cos it was… ridiculous . Ridiculously big.' She looked at him now, sort of angry, as if he'd said he didn't believe her. 'I'm not joking, you know. And I could tell he wanted whoever was in the Moat to look at it. Like he was trying to shock them.'

'And was anyone in there? Any lights on?'

'No. It was, like, two in the morning. Later I was sort of thinking about it and I thought maybe he was looking at himself in the reflection. You know — in the window? With the lights off inside he'd have been able to watch himself.'

'Maybe.'

In his head Caffery played it back: the restaurant deserted, the only illumination the coloured light of the optics and the Coors sign above the bar; outside the lights from Redcliffe Quay and the reflections in the water; a section of darkness between the river and the restaurant. He imagined the girl's blurred outline in the window as she walked across the floor with the bucket. He saw her face, white and shocked, ears tuning in to a small sound, eyes swivelling to focus out into the dark night. He saw a child's silhouette against the orange sky watching itself naked in a plate-glass window. A Priapus.

'Where do you think he came from?'

'Oh, the water,' she said, sounding surprised he hadn't figured that out yet. 'Yeah — that was where he came from. The water.'

'You mean in a boat?'

'No. He came out of the water. Swam.'

'To the pontoon?'

'I didn't see him arrive, but I knew that's where he'd come from because he was wet — just dripping. And that's where he went afterwards. Back in the water over there. There, where that red thing is now. Really quick it was, he was — like an eel.'

Caffery turned. She was pointing to the red marker buoy in the water. Sergeant Marley — Flea — must be underneath it by now, because the surface crew were standing on the pontoon peering down into the water. There was a life line snaking up out of the water to the surface attendant and Dundas was talking in a low voice into the coms panel, but it was a struggle to imagine anyone was down there: the water was smooth, featureless, reflecting the red sky. Someone had brought out a 'dead stretcher', a rigid orange polyurethane block, and it lay expectantly on the decking ready to be thrown in. There was a weird silence hanging over the scene in the fading light — as if they were all listening to the water, waiting to see something shoot out of it. A human that looked like a man but was small enough to be a child, maybe. A human that moved like an eel.

Caffery turned back to the girl with the red hair. Her eyes were watering now, as if she was reliving the fear, as if she was remembering something dark and wet slipping silently into the water.

'I know,' she said, seeing his expression. 'I know. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I watched it for a while, moving along the wall and then…'

'And then?'

'It went under. Under the water without leaving a ripple. And I never saw it again.'

Flea and her unit did more than just dive: along with normal support-unit duties, riot control and warrant enforcement, they were trained in confined-space searches and chemical and biological clear-up. The spin-off of knowing how to use all that protective clothing was that if ever a rotting corpse turned up in the area — in or out of the water — Flea's team was drafted in to remove it. They'd got so good at moving decomposed corpses that in December 2004 they'd been sent to Thailand to work on the disaster-victim identification exercise: in ten days the team recovered almost two hundred bodies.

People couldn't believe she coped with it. Especially after the tsunami, they said. Didn't she have nightmares? Not really, she replied. And, anyway, we get counselling. Then they asked if she needed to do it, and wasn't pulling rotting bodies out of pipes and drains just wasting her talent? Surely, if she only had a word with her inspector and put in for her 'aide' transfer to CID, she could be in plain clothes. Wouldn't that be nice?

She didn't answer. They didn't know she couldn't give it up. They didn't know that since her parents' accident the only time she could think straight was when she'd been able to return someone's body to the family, knowing that somewhere some mother or father or son or daughter could get a bit further along their recovery. And the diving — over everything it was the diving. Without the diving — which she'd been doing all her life with her family — she'd never get up in the morning. Under water was the only place she was herself.

Except now, because this evening even under water she was uneasy. The water in the harbour had settled a bit and she was getting vague visual references if she used her torch. Submerged shapes began to appear in the murk; landmarks she recognized; a submerged heating tank chucked off one of the boats a month ago; a car about ten metres to her left — a Peugeot with its windscreen and tax disc still visible in the murk if you got close enough. It was an insurance jobbie, pushed in near the Ostrich Inn before the slip had been blocked. It had been there for almost six months before the dredger arm clunked against it one February morning. She'd searched and stropped it as a favour for the harbour master — now he was waiting for the crane to be serviced so he could lift it.

But even though it was all familiar and straightforward — like a hundred other speculative searches she'd done — it didn't stop a weird apprehension settling round her as she worked. Some people said the harbour was strange: they talked about weird entrances that led from the bed out into a deeper underworld, like the bricked-over ancient moat that disappeared under Castle Green, joining the river Frome a quarter of a mile away in a dark, secret junction ten feet underground. But she'd dived it a hundred times before and she knew it wasn't that making her shaky. And it wasn't the deputy SIO either, even though she hated the way he looked at her, as if she was a kid, going straight through all her professional stuff and reminding her just how scary life was and how stupidly young she'd felt since the accident — even that wasn't enough to make her feel like this. No. In her heart she knew where this creepy feeling was coming from: it was from what she'd done last night in Dad's study.