Mo Hayder: Ritual

'Empty?'

She darted her head in, then out again, nodding. 'Empty.'

He swivelled through the doorway and into the room, went to the wardrobe and opened it. There was a line of clothes hanging up; no one was inside it. Caffery glanced under the bed and pulled back the duvet. The window was closed. No one had come through here. It was as if the skinny guy in the jacket had vanished into thin air.

He was trying to work out what he'd missed in the flat when he realized Flea wasn't moving. She was still standing in the doorway, staring at the walls. He followed her eyeline and saw why she was being so quiet.

The walls were papered in hardcore gay S amp;M. One bore posters from Deviant, the S amp;M club in Old Market, boasting its equipment of '2 slings, 2 crosses, 2 doggy tables…' Another wall showed a series of pictures of a man in a see-through plastic tunic, his penis in a leather ring, blood pouring from the wounds on his body and congealing under the plastic like packed meat. In the first two pictures he was being forced to lick the feet of a fully dressed businessman. In the last he was being held face down in a toilet.

'Whoa.' Caffery whistled. 'Heavy-duty shit.'

He went to the last wall, which was covered with a single blown-up photo, real or mocked-up, it was difficult to tell. It showed a shaven-headed man in a leather apron biting off the nipple of a man wearing only black Dr Martens and a white studded dog collar. Stapled to it at waist height were ten photographic A4s. Caffery bent down to them and saw something that would convict Baines in a second. The photographs showed everything that had happened in the North West Tower on the Hopewell estate. They showed a small black guy in a tribal outfit, a red tabard, his hair beaded and white paint smeared on his cheeks. It was the guy in the jacket, pictured in different poses: one showed him performing a ritual dance wearing the robes of a witch doctor, baring his teeth at the camera lens, but the others showed him standing next to a half-naked man on a sofa — Caffery guessed it was Ian Mallows — and inserting a cannula into his arm, letting the blood drain off into a large plastic jug. And the next one — Caffery had to pinch his nose to stop stomach acid coming into the back of his throat — showed the witch doctor crouched next to a body, holding a knife to the raw, bloodied stumps where hands had once been.

He swallowed hard and steeled himself to look closely at this picture. There were things to avoid: Mallows's pale body — he was assuming it was Mallows — the blood that had fountained up the whitened arms, the eyes rolled back. He had to concentrate to block these things because something else was more wrong than all of the obvious wrong. There was only one unreal thing in the photograph, and that was the face of the witch doctor.

He squinted at those eyes and saw something he recognized: a blankness, a lie. There was something about the posture — the knife held up for the camera, the face too posed — that made him think of holiday snaps. It came to him quite fast: It's not you who did the cutting, is it? You're just the act . He didn't have to form the question, So if not you then who? because he knew the answer. He knew the person who had done the cutting.

Shit, he thought. There's no giving you the benefit of the doubt, Tig, mate. You're never going to be redeemed. You steered me wrong, sending me to TIDARA. And then, in a flash, he understood why.

'Baines,' he said. Flea was standing behind him, her face white. 'Did he know Kaiser? Through you?'

'I'm sorry?'

'I said, did Baines know Kaiser.'

'No,' she said faintly. 'No — I mean-' She glanced at him. 'Yes — he knew of him.'

'About him and ibogaine?'

Her tongue darted out and she licked her lips. 'Probably. Why?'

He sighed. 'Nothing. Ever get the feeling you've been led by the bollocks?'

Flea came up beside him, still staring at the photos. She held up her hand towards them, her hand hovering, not quite touching them, copper's instinct not to touch, but he knew she wanted to. 'Christ,' she breathed. 'Who is he?'

'I don't know, but probably our friend in the jacket. And if I had to lay bets on it I'd say that's Mallows on the sofa.'

'Oh, fuck,' she muttered thickly. 'It's true, then.' She sat down at the little computer table, propping her face in her hands.

He turned away from the photographs, wanting to touch her, to rest his hand on her hair, knowing that he couldn't. 'Tell me.'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Except…'

'Yeah?'

'Except that when I went to see Mabuza I was so sure he knew I was job.'

'How come?'

Something guarded crossed her eyes. 'Nothing — just I had a feeling he'd been warned. The place was covered with crucifixes, as if he was trying to show he ran a good Christian household. And…'

'And?' Caffery said, eyes on the photographs.

'He's gay,' she said quietly. 'Tig. Very gay.'

'Gay as nails,' he said, 'by the looks of things. Didn't you know?'

'Yes, I knew,' she said, in a monotone. 'I always knew. He let me doubt it, but now I think he was trying to open me up, get me to feed him information about the case.'

'Which he'd feed back to Mabuza. I knew someone was emceeing the fucking thing, just didn't think it'd be some white gay boy.'

Flea was still staring at the walls. 'But that's Tig for you — most of his clients are black, Asian. He's street, you know. He's one of them. For a while Atrium even liked him for a snout.'

Caffery examined the small bookshelf above Flea's head. Lined up was a row of MPF diskettes. One had the word 'Magic' scrawled across it in crude writing. The next two had the name 'Mabuza' printed in Magic Marker.

Caffery had his hands on the little MPF diskette when something stopped him. It made him feel cold and still all at once. It made him turn to Flea. They didn't need to speak — both knew what the other was thinking. They were thinking that they had just heard what sounded like someone, quite nearby, pushing over a large piece of furniture.

'Where was it from?' Caffery whispered. He stood above her, hand out, the dust and sweat from the chase through the streets engrained on the underside of his shirt sleeve. 'Where did it come from?'

'I dunno,' Flea murmured. It wasn't coming from the flat… not exactly. It was coming from the back of the room where another flat would be.

She turned very slowly and looked at the bed, the cupboard. She was picturing Tig's mum last week, muttering to herself in the kitchen. Stop the blacks coming through the walls. Stop them putting their faces through the walls.

'The walls,' she whispered.

'The walls ?'

'Check them.'

He gave her a strange look, but went to the wall anyway, sweeping his hands along it, feeling for anomalies, his expression saying he was humouring her. He pulled the bedspread away from the window, searching for an airbrick maybe, or a hole he hadn't noticed, while Flea got down on the dirty, gritty carpet to scan the wall under the bed. Nothing. It was only when Caffery went back to the wardrobe and opened it, kicking aside the junk on the floor, that she saw him react. She saw him half turn away, then stop.

'What?' She got up, came to stand next to him and saw what he was looking at. The back of the wardrobe wasn't plastered. A piece of plywood was propped upright behind the hanging clothes. He dropped to a squat and looped his fingers behind it, then pulled it away from the wall, setting loose a cloud of plaster dust. Immediately they could smell mould and ammonia.

'OK,' he muttered, dusting off his hands. 'I think we've found him.'

Behind the plasterboard a hole about five feet tall and three wide had been knocked into the wall. Plaster dust covered the floor, and a piece of ragged wallpaper hung in shreds. They bent their heads and peered through into a small corridor, with ruined walls, electric leads hanging from the ceiling. Light filtered from an opening to their left, blocked by a padlocked iron gate. Somewhere inside water dripped. Beyond the gate they could see the beginnings of another room. Only the floor was visible, threadbare bits of carpet glued to the flaking underlay, a newspaper lying folded with the sports page face up. But in front of them the corridor extended into darkness.