Mo Hayder: Ritual

She wasn't methodical by nature — it was how she'd got her nickname, jumping at things — but her training in the job had helped and when she began to search Dad's study she did it as she'd do a forensic retrieval with the unit: systematically, in silence, cross-legged on the floor as the grandfather clock ticked in the hallway outside and the neighbours' horses whickered from the fields. In every corner of the room there were boxes crammed with journals, notes and projector slides, faculty photographs of Dad, owlish in a corduroy jacket; four sealed boxes of books marked with his best friend Kaiser Nduka's name. When she'd finished searching, almost everything she'd found was exactly what she'd have expected of Dad.

Almost everything.

Because among the detritus and dust there were two things she hadn't expected. Two things she couldn't explain.

The first was a small safe. Pushed under the desk so it was hard up against the wall, it was the old-fashioned sort with a brass Yale dial lock. Unopenable. She tried every number sequence she could think of — Mum's birthday, Dad's birthday, her birthday, Thom's, her parents' wedding anniversary. She even got an old mathematical book down from the shelves and leafed her way through integer sequences, trying them at random: the Wythoff Array, the Para-Fibonacci sequence. But the safe wouldn't budge, so in the end she pushed it aside and turned back to the other thing she'd found: a purple brocade jewellery roll of her mother's pushed into the back of the desk drawer.

Inside, there was a ziplock freezer bag, and the second she unwrapped it she knew what it contained — she recognized them from the drugs warrants she'd executed over the years. Mushrooms, wispy shrivelled things huddled together like tiny dry ghosts. There must have been hundreds — enough to give real weight to the jewellery roll. She opened the bag and tipped them out into her skirt. They came with a scattering of small fibres, spreading across the fabric, and as they did a memory lifted into her head.

It was a picture of Dad, lying on his back on the sofa, his hands resting on his chest, a cushion on his face to shut out the light. He'd lie like that for hours on end, not speaking or moving, as if he was sleeping. Except he wasn't sleeping. There was something too unsettled about him for sleep. It was something else. Now, poking the mushrooms, she wondered if she was beginning to understand. So, Dad, she thought, was this what it was for you all that time? And I never guessed.

She sat looking at the mushrooms for a long time. Then, when the grandfather clock struck eleven, something big locked into place in the back of her head. She got to her feet and shovelled them back into the ziplock bag, put it into the velvet jewellery roll and got to her feet. Picking up the safe she went to the kitchen, put everything on the shelf, then stood for a few moments at the window, staring out. Her mouth was dry, her head was thudding, because she knew, as sure as she knew the smell of her own father, that she was going to take the mushrooms too.

Now, standing next to the underwater recovery unit's Mercedes van at the head of the slip, the arclights fizzing and popping as the team wandered around, Flea could still feel the sickly psilocybin moving through her system. Even when, at eight, they called a halt because everyone was too knackered and the Health and Safety lot would tap her on the shoulder if they got wind she'd worked the men these hours, even then she found it difficult to turn away from the harbour — from the mesmerizing pull of the water and the eerie sense that something nasty was going to come out of it.

The team had gathered at the van and were coiling the yellow and blue umbilicals, packing up the surface supply panel. DI Caffery stood a few feet away, just inside the shadows, arguing on his mobile: she could hear most of the conversation — he was speaking with the SIO who was already pissed off that he'd taken all this extra dive unit time without waiting for the pathologist to confirm that the hand had been cut off.

She turned away tiredly, a bit irritated. Her team had knocked themselves out. They'd searched the whole of Welshback: under the houseboats, even into the vaulted foundations of the bonded warehouses opposite, finding everything down there from mobile phones, pairs of knickers, tables and chairs from the bars on the front to a decommissioned gun. Four divers had clocked up ninety minutes each; they'd covered a sixty-metre section of the harbour. But, and she knew she was the only one who noticed this, it wasn't enough for DI Caffery. She could tell he was disappointed in her, let down that she couldn't work a miracle when it was her unit who'd set him out on this wild-goose chase. When at last she'd closed the doors of the Mercedes and seen the team on their way, she couldn't help it — she couldn't let him go away thinking she'd failed: she caught up with him as he made his way back to the car.

'Look,' she said, in a voice more apologetic-sounding than she'd meant it to be, 'I suppose there's a chance the rest of the body could have shifted.'

'Yeah?' he said. She had to walk fast to keep up with him, splashing through foul-smelling puddles at the front of the restaurant because he didn't break step. 'Meaning?'

'Uh, meaning there was flow-through here today — they had the sluices open — so I suppose theoretically it could have shifted down into the upper harbour.' As she said it she knew it was bullshit. She'd never in her six years in the unit known a body to do that. It was pretty much physically impossible. 'It's a big jump to make, I grant you, but if you really want to keep at it we could be back here in the morning.'

'Sure,' he said, without even taking time to think about it. He swung into a junky old car, badly parked across the entrance to the restaurant and put the key into the ignition. 'That's good,' he said, through the open window. 'See you at first light, then.'

He started the engine and he was off. No goodbye, just a quick swerve out into the deserted road. The headlights disappeared and then she was alone on the quayside, except for the two uniforms out of Broadbury patrolling the sealedoff area in the distance. She stood for a moment, in the silence, realizing that her feet were wet and greasy from the puddle, that she was shivering and tired, but most of all realizing how totally pissed off she was. Not so much pissed off with DI Caffery as with herself. A body shifting along the harbour floor? Yeah, right. Christ, what a sap.

The hallucinations the day before had come on like an electrical storm. At first there had been nothing. Not even the elevated pulse she'd expected. Flea had taken the mushrooms at eleven thirty. A full hour had gone by and she was about to get up from her father's sofa and go into the kitchen to make toast, when something made her start. She'd had the impression of a firework exploding outside the window, somewhere in the blue sky high over the spires of Bath.

She sat up and turned to the window, and as she did, she spotted something else, a movement behind her in the shadow: a vague smear of colour, as if something in the study was reaching out a hand for the back of her neck. When she turned there was nothing, only the patches of sunlight dancing on the wall. For a while she sat looking stupidly at it. And then, suddenly, she was laughing. She leaned back, the laughter huge in her mouth, bigger than her tongue, bigger than her throat. And that was how it started.

She couldn't have said when the hallucinations reached their peak, how long into the trip it was, but at one point she knew who she was and where she was and that she'd taken a drug and that things were happening, and the next moment her face was hard against the sofa, and the fabric, so close to her eyes, was magnified a hundred times, the weave like the trunks of trees. She could smell mothballs and see a small dot of white, probably a stray thread in the sofa, but suddenly it was big and she could see it wasn't a thread, it was her mother in the trees, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a floral scarf round her head, squatting down to inspect a patch of dog violet.