Mo Hayder: Ritual

She tried not to think about it, working in the soupy water. They'd chosen a jackstay search pattern, pinning a shot line at each side of the harbour because it was narrow enough at this point, then stringing a diagonal line between the two and moving along it, sweeping with a free hand. She'd been working the pattern for almost forty minutes — too long, really. Not that she cared, but it was dark surface-side, she could tell that from the colour of the water, and Dundas should have pulled her out by now. She wasn't going to undermine the authority she'd given him, but she was tired now of swimming to and fro, moving the jackstay weight a metre along the harbour wall, then turning, keeping the line on her left as she sculled her way back, working slowly, hugging the bottom, dredging with her hands in a one-metre arc.

A defensive tactile search it was called, tactile because you did everything by touch, and defensive because you expected any minute to find something hazardous — broken glass, fishing line. Sometimes the last thing you expected to find was what you were looking for. A foot. Or hair. Once, the first contact she'd had with a corpse had been its nostrils — both fingers up them. You couldn't have managed that if you'd tried, said Dundas. Another time she'd dragged a piece of industrial-pipe lagging to the surface, sweating and swearing, one hundred per cent certain it was the leg of a thirty-year-old gym instructor who'd gone off Clifton Bridge a week earlier. Everything got upside down when you were weighted to neutral buoyancy and could see only a few inches in front of you. When she hit the shotline under the pontoon, only two metres from where she'd found the hand, it was a weird relief.

Moving slowly because she was starting to tire now, she hauled the weight out of the mud, moved it along a metre and dropped it again. She had made it secure and was checking the line was tight ready for the return journey when something happened that made goosebumps break out all over her. It was the weirdest thing. She didn't see anything, and afterwards she wouldn't even be able to swear she'd felt anything, but suddenly, for a reason she couldn't explain, she was certain someone else was in the water with her.

She twisted round, ripping out her ankle knife and jamming her back against the wall. Breathing hard she clutched the shotline and, moving her feet a little, steadied herself with the knife out in front of her, ready for something to come hurtling at her.

'Rich?' she said shakily, into the coms mic.

'Yeah?'

'See anyone else in the water?'

'Uh — no. Don't think so. Why?'

'I dunno.' She kept herself upright by sculling her hand a little, stopping the water twisting her back to the wall. The air in her suit tried to rise to the surface, gathering round her neck, pressing on her and making her light-headed. 'Think I've seen a ghost.'

'What's up?'

'Nothing. Nothing,' she said. Her head was thudding now. The shot buoy was meant to take a human's weight and she could haul herself up it in a second if anything came at her. But her training stopped her bolting for the surface and she waited, breathing hard, eyes scanning the gloom, moving the knife in a defensive circle around her. Bristol harbour, she told herself. Only Bristol harbour. And she hadn't actually seen a thing. Minutes ticked by. The needle on her SPG contents gauge moved minutely, and slowly, slowly, when nothing happened and her pulse and breathing began to return to normal, she pushed the knife back into her ankle garter. It was last night and Dad's study catching up with her again. This wasn't funny. Not at all. She steadied herself and tipped down from the waist so the air returned to her legs and she wasn't being squeezed any more round the neck. She let a moment or two pass, the silt swirling round her.

'Dundas?' she said. 'You there?'

'You all right, Sarge?'

'No. No, I'm not.' I'm having hallucinations, Rich. Paranoia. The whole works . 'You've dived me for forty minutes,' she said at last. 'I think it's time to pull me out. Don't you?'

Dad's study had been locked since the accident. Flea had always known where the key was — hanging on the nail in the pantry — it was just that she'd never found the courage to use it. Two years had passed since the accident and still she couldn't bring herself to go into the place Dad used to retreat to think. In the early days after the accident, her brother Thom would go in there to think, to reflect on what had happened, but now he wouldn't come near it, wouldn't even go in and help her sort everything out. Everyone knew how hard Thom had taken their parents' loss, even harder than Flea had, and maybe, when you thought about what had happened to him in the accident, it wasn't a surprise he refused even to say the words: Mum and Dad …

In the end she'd had to do it alone. It was a sunny Tuesday morning two days before the hand was found in the harbour. The television was on in the kitchen and she was in the pantry searching the back of the shelves for an old flour canister, a blue and white bakeware tin with a sieve in the lid that Mum always used for making sponges. She was stretching forward when something made her look sideways, and there, glinting at her, was the key. She stood for a moment, her arms pushed into the back of the cool darkness, her eyes rolled sideways, looking at it. For a moment it seemed to be communicating something to her — fanciful, she knew. Nevertheless she decided right there and then that it was telling her the time had come.

The house her parents had lived in for thirty years was ramshackle, spreadeagled. Four eighteenth-century stone-workers' dwellings joined together, it rambled along the side of a remote country road for almost sixty feet, a stoneflagged corridor running down its spine. The study was at the end of the corridor, and when she got there she was a little shaky on her feet. She stopped at the door, feeling like Alice in Wonderland with the key lodged in her palm, the other hand resting on the door, her nose pressing against it, breathing in the smoky waxed musk of the wood. Dad never encouraged the children to go in, but she knew what the room on the other side of the door looked like: stone-built, open beams, her father's books covering all three walls from floor to ceiling. There was an old-fashioned librarian's stool he'd push along with his foot — she could see him now, the spectacles he'd mended with Araldite sliding down his nose as he peered at the spines of his books.

With all this in her head that morning she was prepared for what happened when she put the key in the lock and turned it. She was prepared for the way she was picked up by the scruff of her neck and thrown back to her childhood. It was the air: warm and sweat-stained, tinted with turpentine and resin, pipe tobacco and heather coming out of the books, the way Dad'd always smell when he came in from the garden on an autumn day. Inhaling it was like inhaling her father's last breath. Then she saw the librarian's stool against the bottom shelf and the way the battered wing chair was pushed slightly back from the desk as if he'd stood up only a few moments ago, and she leaned into the doorframe, pressing her teeth together until they creaked to stop the tears.

Eventually she pushed herself away from the door and went to the desk, halting briefly as if Dad might be there, saying, 'Not when I'm working, Flea. Go and help your mother.' The sun was coming through the gaps in the shutters, striking the back of the chair, and when she put her hands there the leather was slightly greasy and warm, like the skin of her hands. The old draughts set, its cheap balsa wood pieces painted in scagliola to resemble marble, sat in the centre of the desk where Dad used to play against himself late into the night.