After a while, when she couldn't find any numbers and she couldn't think of any other place he might have hidden the code, she put the dissertation back, crouched on the floor and pulled out the three boxes of Kaiser's stuff, each secured with thick parcel tape. She slit them, using the sharp edge of a ruler from her father's desk and began pulling out the contents — three stacks of periodicals bound with rubber bands, a sketch of what looked like an African tribal dance, book after book on religion and psychology — all covered with plaster dust; at some point they must have spent time in Kaiser's house.
The book Kaiser had been talking about was at the bottom, another dissertation, it seemed, produced on a dot-matrix printer. The cover illustration was a line drawing of a plant root photocopied. The pages were bound with a red plastic spiral. The Use of the Tabernanthe Iboga Root in Shamanic Initiation, it said, above the author's name and the University of California, Berkeley's copyright line. She pulled it out and sat down in her father's chair to leaf through the pages of graphs and research methodology sections.
By the time she'd got to the end of it she understood more. Ibogaine was root bark. It was used by the Bwiti believers in Cameroon and Gabon to give them what they believed was access to their ancestors — they described using it as 'cutting open the head to allow the light in'. The book was dotted with poor-quality black-and-white photographs of an African tribe, some dressed in raffia skirts, some in cat fur, a tribal elder holding a torch made of tree bark. There was a section about fatalities from ibogaine. The book's author said he had no reliable way to estimate the number of those who died as a result of using it: it was sometimes used to treat withdrawal symptoms after chronic heroin addiction so there was little documentation of a participant's physical health at the outset. Anecdotal evidence suggested up to one in a hundred users may have died as a result; the heart and the liver were the two organs most commonly affected.
Flea put the book under her arm and was about to switch off the light and take it back to her bedroom when something on the floor caught her eye. In the litter of books at her feet some had fallen open. One photo in particular made her stop, a photo that showed a pair of severed hands — shrivelled and black in colour. She turned the book over and read the title. The back of her skull crawled.
She put the dissertation down, sat on the floor and, slightly dazed, turned the pages of the book, looking at the photos, reading slowly. In the corridor the grandfather clock ticked patiently, but she was numb to time passing: the words in the book crept slowly, nastily, into her thoughts, freezing everything else.
When she'd finished she raised her eyes to the window, the moonlit garden with the ghostly creepers hanging round the window. She should be rolling safely into bed now. Instead she was sweating. The windows were open but she was hot — sitting upright and alert on the floor, pulling unconsciously at the neck of her T-shirt. Suddenly she'd forgotten Kaiser and ibogaine and Tig. Suddenly she'd forgotten her self-pact — her promise never, ever to get involved again in theorizing about a case. Suddenly she couldn't think about anything except hands buried under a restaurant. And, most of all, that the owner of the restaurant was African.
17
8 May
He's never fought like this in his life. He's fought and fought, half killed himself, and still he can't get out. No matter how many times he's rammed himself into the locked iron gates, blundering like a darted animal at the walls, no matter how much he's bellowed and tugged at the grating on the window, in the end he can't find the strength and he gives up. He lies down on the sofa, face in his hands, and begins to sob. 'Please,' he cries, 'I've changed my mind. I don't want the fucking money.'
Skinny is sitting against the wall watching this. His knees are up and his eyes are wide. He looks scared. He looks as desperate as Mossy feels.
'Please, I mean, really fucking seriously please, let me out of this place. I swear I won't tell a soul — I swear.' He breaks off, tears running down his cheeks, his hands up in the air in front of his face, half ashamed of his fear. His hands. His fucking hands. It's his hands they want to take, and it's all too un-fucking-believable, this place, with the bars and the locks. This insanity. He goes on crying for a while. Then Skinny makes a strange noise. He gets to his feet and turns to the gate. He taps three times on the bars — a signal.
Mossy drops his hands. 'What you doing?' he yells. 'Where're you going? Don't fucking go.'
'Uncle,' he says quietly. His voice is thick, a little embarrassed. He doesn't turn to him. 'I'm going to speak to Uncle.'
'Who?' Mossy says. 'Who the fuck's…' There's a noise in the corridor. A shaft of light, a figure appears in silhouette and the words stick in Mossy's mouth. He goes really quiet. Moving very quietly, not taking his eyes off Skinny, he gets up and picks his way to the back of the sofa, squatting in the corner, sitting on his hands like that will protect him. It's too dark to see who this new person is but it looks like a man. The driver? There's a moment when he can see gloved hands unlocking the gate, then Skinny slips out. There's a clang as the gate is closed, locked, and Mossy is left on his own in the silence.
He doesn't move for a long time, just stares at the closed gate expecting someone to come back through it. But minutes tick by and nothing happens. After what seems like an hour, when no one reappears, he gets up cautiously and moves around, breathing fast, like an athlete, which is a joke for someone with a body like his, trying to keep his legs springy, half bent, facing the gate so he never has to take his eyes off it for more than a few seconds. He goes round the place checking every corner half by feel.
The room is perfectly square. It must have been a bedroom because there is girls' wallpaper in some places: a frieze of ballerinas. At one end there is a small corridor and at the end of that a bathroom. Briefly he takes his eyes off the gate to check it out. And then he wishes he hadn't.
There's some heavy-duty S amp;M equipment riveted to the walls — no doubt what's gone on in here in the past. Coiled on the floor is a yellow, industrial hose, the type used for cleaning factory equipment. The hose says more than anything: it says that what happens in here, or what's meant to happen, needs to be cleaned up after. There's a half-broken bog with a window above it. It's barred, the window, with SITEX again, no getting out of that, but back in the corridor there's another window, and on this one the grille, which is oversized and goes all the way down to the floor, is bent, just at the bottom, as if something has squeezed through it.
He gets down on the floor with his back to the wall and tries to push his head up into the gap. He gets his shoulders in — and if he turns his head he can see the grey daylight above. This must lead outside, but as he tries to push a little higher he realizes he's stuck. He can't go any further. He kicks a bit, tries to push it that last inch, but the grille is digging into his spine so hard it feels like it's going to break his back. Someone could be coming in through the gate any second and find him trapped here, so he shuffles himself down, pulling back into the room, inch by inch, the grille digging into his skin. He comes out with his T-shirt over his head and the skin scraped off his back.
He stands and pulls the T-shirt down, shivering now. He hates this room. Apart from the gate and the two windows there is only one other entrance. He remembers this from last time because then it reminded him of an animal's cage. It's a hole in the wall, hacked roughly into the breeze blocks, the shape and position of a fireplace. An iron gate is set into the sides so it's barred too, like the one Skinny's just gone through. You could imagine a lion in there, or a tiger. He squats and on the other side of the grille sees a pile of clothing. He's just about to reach for it when the gate to his right opens.