Ritual

Caffery was never put off track when someone changed direction without warning. It was part of being a cop. 'I didn't. I could maybe hazard a guess about what it was like in London. But not out here. This is new territory to me.'

'Well, now you're in on the secret. Twenty grand. Now, my parents, see, were doctors — both dead now, of course — and they had one of the biggest houses in Clifton. They paid sixty K for it in nineteen eighty and it came straight to me when they died. Course, I couldn't use it because I was in a high-security wing at Long Lartin until-' He made a sound in the back of his throat and rolled his dark blue eyes. 'But you already know that, don't you?'

'I've seen the file.'

'The executors paid off the tax and lodged the house with a management company. They banked the rent for the last ten years of my sentence. It was a beauty of a house — even I could see that. It had six bedrooms and a coach-house, one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in Bristol, so said the estate agents. When I came out of the nick last year I sold it. What do you think they gave me?'

'I just sold a house in London. It wasn't much but my parents gave fifteen for it in the seventies and I got back more than three fifty. I don't know? Five hundred?'

'Try four times that. Almost two million. Every month I get more than eight grand interest paid into my account. Do they have that on my intelligence file?' He threw the bottle into the air, let it spin round, light moving against the navy blue sky, and caught it with a neat smile.

'Here,' he said, jamming it into Caffery's chest. 'I drink cider. But thanks anyway.'

Flea stayed with Tig until eight. They got fish and chips from the only shop in Bristol that still wrapped it in newspapers. They took it back to his flat, shared a bottle of wine and talked, and all the time she kept prodding herself to ask him about the text — about what he'd wanted to talk about. But the idea kept slipping away and when she did remember, when she was getting up to leave at the end of the evening, he waved it aside. No, he said, it was nothing. Just missed seeing you, that's all.

She buttoned her coat, found her keys and kissed Tig's cheek — he always froze when she came near him, as if he'd gone into spasm, his arms out at his sides as if he'd been petrified, but she did it anyway. She was turning away, half smiling to herself at the way she could immobilize him with embarrassment, when she saw his mother standing in the doorway. She was dressed in a pink quilted housecoat and her long grey hair was loose round her shoulders. She looked older than fifty, as if only half of her was actually in the world, the rest somewhere else. A skeleton in a nightgown.

'Mum,' Tig said. 'Mum. Go back to bed. It's late.'

But she held on to the doorframe, her face confused, looking from one of them to the other, her mouth opening and closing as if she was trying to speak. Tig got up and took her arm.

'Oh, Tommy,' she muttered. 'Please. Tell them to go away, will you, love? Tell them to leave me alone.'

'Come on, Mum, you're dreaming again. Back to bed.'

'Tell them to leave me alone — the blacks.'

'Mum, please.' Tig put his arm round her and tried to coax her back down the corridor. 'Come on, darling, back to bed.'

But she resisted. She clung to the doorframe, and turned her head to Flea, as if she might help. All the veins under her yellow skin were standing out blue and sick-looking. 'Oh, dearie,' she whispered. 'Oh, my love, I'm in so much trouble.'

'Mrs Baines, do you remember me? I'm Flea. I met you before. Remember?'

'Ask them, dear, will you? Ask them to leave me alone with their bang-bang music and their smells. Tell them to stop running up and down my corridor and putting their faces through my walls.'

'Don't worry, Mrs Baines.' Flea stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. It was cold and as fragile as a matchstick. 'I'm sure Tommy's got it all organized.'

Mrs Baines blinked at her. Then she began to cry. It was a thin, confused sound, no energy in it. She reached out for Tig. 'Tommy, stop the little one putting his face through my wall again.'

'Mum. It's a television programme. You've watched too much television.'

'I know it's a television programme, Tommy. I know. Have you got that butter knife?' She twisted away from him, peering blearily round the kitchen. 'Where's the butter knife? Your dad's butter knife with the bone handle? Give it to me so I can defend myself.'

Tig glanced despairingly at Flea and she knew he was asking her to help him through this. But all she could do was wrinkle her face sympathetically. Maybe she was kidding herself that because of Thom she could understand what Tig went through with his mum. But this was much worse than having a brother who was out of work and depressed. What Tig dealt with daily was beyond her. And, somehow, he still managed not to use.

'Come on, Mum, I'll get you back to bed. Then I'll bring you some hot milk. You'd like that, wouldn't you?'

'What about the butter knife?'

'I'll bring that too. As soon as you're in bed I'll bring it. I promise.'

'And you'll stop them looking at me? When I'm in my bed?'

'I will. I promise. I'll switch the TV off.'

And he eased her away through the door, his hands on her shoulder-blades, two beaten people, moving slowly down the crowded hallway, leaving Flea alone to stare blankly at the kitchen door swinging on its hinges, thinking that whatever your relationship with your parents somewhere along the line there was always pain.

It was turning out that the Walking Man wasn't like everyone thought. Apart from the cider and the money — Caffery was sure no one knew about the money — there was more. For one thing he didn't stop in the place he found himself when the sun went down. It was more planned than that. He had pit-stops all over the West Country, little hidey-holes just off the road where he knew he wouldn't be bothered. He left things hidden there, under rocks, under cattle troughs, tucked into crumbling walls. On this pit-stop he had tins, a pile of foam-rubber mats and four jars of scrumpy buried in the loose earth next to the hedgerow.

'Should always drink the alcohol produced by the land you're standing on.' He uncorked the glass jar with his teeth. 'You go to Cuba, you drink rum. You go to Mexico, you drink tequila. Never get a hangover if you do that. Generations of wisdom've gone in to making these drinks. Generations learning how a body rubs up against the climate and the soil and the water.'

Caffery unscrewed the bottle of Scotch and tipped the contents on to the frozen earth. He leaned forward and held it out to the Walking Man, who carefully filled it with cloudy scrumpy, holding the glass mason jar to the bottle neck.

'And in Somerset you drink apples. Cider.'

The fire was blazing well now, throwing its light into the faces of the two men. They sat on the corrugated squares of foam and watched the night fall. As the last of the daylight faded, the glow of the lights of Bristol came on to the north-west, misty and distant under a grey sky like a fabled living city, as if dragons lived there, not students and drugs-dealers and people gone bad enough to hack off someone's hands and bury them under a restaurant.

Caffery sat back and put the bottle to his lips. The scrumpy was cold, but it brought such a hit of autumn and childhood apple orchards that he almost drank it all at once, just to stay in that memory and not think about buried hands.

'Farmer I get that from,' said the Walking Man, 'until nineteen ninety he was still putting a carcass into the vat. A pig or a chicken. Said it sweetened the mixture and since the inspectors stopped him the scrumpy's not a shadow of what it used to be.'

Caffery drank some more, straight down, not caring about the car parked on the lane and whether he'd need to drive home. This was how farmers and workers had lived for years and there was something comforting about that. Now, with the cider in his mouth and the honest coldness of a ploughed field on his backside, he let the weirdness of the day fall away from him, let himself stop worrying about some poor bastard with no hands, dead or dying. He wiped his mouth and pulled up his knees, rested his elbows on them and leaned forward.