Ritual

'Ah, well,' Tig said, when he saw she wasn't going to speak. 'Looks like there's nothing I can say. Is there? And people like you, well, you never get hooked anyway. Not in the way people like me do.'

She gave a sad smile. 'I've got four days' annual starting Friday, no standby.'

Tig swung out of his chair and got another bag of peanuts from the cupboard. He poured them into the bowl, a little puff of salt coming off them, and gave a sad laugh. 'Friday it is, then. I won't try to talk you out of it.'

She sat looking at the peanuts and knew then that things would always be like this, some people getting away with it and some people not. Some people gilded by life, some not. And in spite of everything, in spite of her loss and her anxiety, in spite of the things she believed she shared with Tig, she knew in her heart that she was gilded. That she was gilded and Tig wasn't.

15

Now that the sun was going down it was getting cold and the Walking Man had stopped walking. He'd squeezed through a hedge on the roadside on the tiny B route in Somerset, and was preparing his camp for the night in the field on the other side, making a pile of the paper scraps he'd gathered from the roadside that day. At half past eight Jack Caffery pulled up his car opposite, his headlights on.

At first he didn't get out, just switched off the engine and watched. This was someone he'd been thinking about for months. It was bizarre to be here at last.

The Walking Man was used to drivers and their ways and paid no attention. When he turned to gather more wood for the fire Caffery caught sight of his face. Here, he thought, is a man who was born at the bottom of a firepit. He was soot-covered from head to toe: the thick socks he wore over his walking boots, tied in place with a piece of cloth at each calf, were blackened and the three-quarter length jacket he wore, tied with washing-line round his waist, was so grimy you wouldn't know what colour it had once been. He was in his late forties — Caffery knew this from his Criminal Records Bureau entry — but to look at him now you'd never have been able to guess his age. His hair hung past his shoulders and a black beard rambled from just below his eyes to his chest, covering him like a cowl.

Caffery dragged his coat from the back seat and got out of the car. It was one of those deserted Somerset lanes so narrow the trees link overhead and turn themselves into a tunneclass="underline" the only light was a little evening sun coming from the gap in the hedgerow that opened on to the Walking Man's field. Caffery shut the car door, buttoned the coat and crossed the lane, pushing himself through the dead remains of a hawthorn bush, getting his old trousers torn, scraping his right sleeve.

In the field he pulled a beanie from his pocket and pulled it down over his ears. It was freezing now it was evening; you'd think it was winter again. He stood on the hard, ploughed ground and waited. The Walking Man continued what he was doing, fishing out a filthy cigarette lighter and putting it to the bottom of the pile of twigs. It flared almost instantaneously, years of firebuilding practice. Flames bit and crackled inside the sticks, casting shadows across the twilit earth.

Caffery came a few steps closer. 'You're the Walking Man.'

He didn't look up. He threw a log on the fire and gathered another two in his gloved hands.

'I said, you're the Walking Man. Aren't you?'

'It's not what I was christened. Not what my mother called me.'

Caffery folded his arms. The Walking Man's voice was educated, sort of polite, but he didn't seem to care who he was speaking to or what they thought. It was as if he'd known Caffery was coming and wasn't bothered whether they talked or not. He dropped the logs on to the fire and watched them for a few moments. Then, satisfied it was going to catch properly, he forced two sticks into the ground next to it, unwrapped the bedroll from his back and draped it over them — spreading it out to warm. His clothing steamed, his breath hung white in the darkening air.

'I've been looking for you for a long time,' Caffery said, after a while.

'And how did you find me?' His voice was light, almost amused. 'I'm not an easy man to find. I move. I walk. That's what I do.'

'And what I do is find people. I'm the police.'

The Walking Man stopped what he was doing and, for the first time, looked up. His eyes were dark-lashed and blue and Caffery had a weird moment of recognition: the same eyes. He and the Walking Man had exactly the same eyes. As if somewhere back down the line they'd shared a relative. Someone as far back as Donegal, maybe.

'I don't like the police.' The Walking Man squinted a little, studying Caffery. He took his time, looking at the beanie, the rough donkey jacket, the Dr Martens. Maybe he was thinking Caffery didn't look like a copper. Or maybe he'd noticed the eyes thing too.

'So,' he said, after a while, 'my old friends. The police. They know where I am, do they?'

'They have an idea. A general idea. You don't stray much out of Somerset and Wiltshire.'

The Walking Man laughed. 'Do they think I didn't spend long enough inside? Or that I'm going to do it again? That I'm going to hurt someone else?'

'Sightings of you get called in. From the public, from people who don't know who you are, maybe see you sleeping rough and think you're ill.'

'Or a danger to them?'

'We don't throw anything away in this job. You're somewhere on an intelligence file.'

'Intelligence,' the Walking Man said to himself, as if it was the wrong word to use for the police.

He turned his back on Caffery to organize his dinner. 'In-tell-igence.'

With the bottle-opener hanging on a tape round his neck, he made holes in the lids of four cans and placed each in the centre of the fire. Then he sat down, moving slowly for the bulk of his clothes, and pulled at the pieces of cloth wrapped round his feet. He removed his boots carefully, taking each lace with caution, and placed them on the ground next to his bedroll. Then he took off his socks, three pairs, and inspected his feet. Caffery saw that in the places his own feet were calloused and red, the Walking Man's were black — as if his body was exuding a kind of protective tar. He used the cloth to rub and dry them, then put on two pairs of dry socks and what looked like sheepskin slippers, which he bound at the ankles with the cloth. After that he took care of his boots: running his hands inside each one, tapping them together at the heels, rubbing a thin line of Vaseline from a tiny pot inside each and setting them near the fire to dry. The Walking Man spent every waking hour of every day walking and his boots needed all the attention he could give them.

'I've come a long way to see you.'

'Have you now?'

'It's taken me a long time to get here.'

'Well, it's taken me a lifetime to get where I am.'

'I know.' Caffery shifted his weight. It was cold out here, really bitter. 'I'm here because I want you to tell me things. I want you to talk about what you did.'

The Walking Man laughed again, mild and polite, as if he had told him a gentle joke. 'And where,' he said, 'does it say I talk for nothing? Hmm? Is there a notice on my back says I'm ready to talk to anybody?' He was still laughing. 'You're not the boss of me. Po-lice-man.'

Caffery unzipped the donkey jacket and pulled out a litre of Scotch from inside his sweater. He held it out. 'Brought you something.'

The Walking Man stared at it, then at Caffery's face. After a few moments he came over and took the bottle, turning it round and round in his hands. Close up his fingernails were raised and yellow, as if they had something bad brewing under them and might fall off at any time. He smelled of firelighters and smoke.

'In nineteen eighty,' he said thoughtfully, looking at the whisky label, with its gold and white picture of a tea clipper, 'an average house in Bristol was worth twenty grand. Did you know that?'