Ritual

She drove quickly to the community centre where Tig took his Wednesday sessions. It was a Victorian schoolhouse, cleaned up and fitted with laminate flooring and disabled toilets with dangling alarm cords. By the time she arrived his group had finished and he was alone in the echoey building. He opened the door to her, wearing a black sweatshirt, camouflage combats tucked into his boots. He was carrying a stack of folders under one arm.

'Well?' she said, as he led her down the corridor to the little office that smelled of new carpets and cleaning fluid. She went fast, trying to keep up with him. 'Have you spoken to him — your friend? The owner?'

'I have.' He threw down the folders on the desk and dropped into a swivel chair, his hands linked on his stomach, spinning round to face at her. He gave her the sort of measured smile he'd give an interviewee.

'OK.' She dumped her holdall and her fleece and shoved her hands into her pockets. 'I'm going to have to beg you.'

Tig gave a dry laugh. 'He's been away,' he said, 'with his wife in Portugal — they've only been back since lunchtime. We can go for a cup of coffee, but it's not exactly open arms. I'm pretending I want to schmooze some more dosh from him for the charity. So for fuck's sake, girl, don't you be going in there and asking police questions, get it?

'I get it.'

'No digging. You sit and keep schtum. Whatever you want to talk about you let him introduce the subject, and if he doesn't introduce it you just walk straight away from it, Flea. Straight away. I'm doing this as a major, major favour, OK? And if it goes tits up, if he gets wind tonight you're filth, then…' He swiped a hand across his throat. 'I'm finished. And it'll be your fault.'

'God, Tig.' She sat down, folding her arms. 'That'll be me, then, well and truly told, eh?'

'That's the way it is. And that's the deal. OK?'

She looked at him for a while, at his hard body and the grey-blue scalp where the hair was shaved. She was thinking about the photo in her bag — the photo of Ian Mallows she'd printed off back at Almondsbury.

She took a breath and was turning to get the photo from her bag when Tig said suddenly, 'So, tell me, how's the professor? Have you spoken to him again?'

'Kaiser, you mean? No. Why?'

'But you're still going there tomorrow?'

'Yes. In the afternoon.'

Tig gazed up at the ceiling, as if he was trying to remember something. 'Just remind me — what's his job again?'

'He's…' Flea paused. 'I don't know — comparative religion. The hallucinations — that's a corner of his job… Why?'

'Why?' Tig fiddled with the collar of his sweatshirt as if he was too hot. 'Just wonder who you hang out with sometimes. The lowlifes you know.'

'Lowlifes?'

'Just wondering if maybe it's time I paid a bit more attention to the men you see.'

'I don't «see» men, Tig. You know that.'

'Maybe you don't.' His face was suddenly serious. 'Maybe you don't. But maybe it's still time for me to pay some attention.'

'What?'

'I should have done it a long time ago, Flea. I should have always shown more of an interest in you.'

'Stop it, for Christ's sake. I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Don't you?' He held her eyes. 'Don't you know?'

Flea gave a tentative laugh. 'Tig?' she said woodenly. 'You're gay.'

There was a beat of shocked silence. Then Tig started to laugh. 'Gay?' he said. 'Oh, give me a fucking break. Gay?'

'Yes, I mean you…' She trailed off, suddenly seeing where this was going. 'Tig,' she said. 'Come on. Tell me you're not serious.'

'I am,' he said quietly. 'I'm very serious.'

She blinked. This was insane. Tig was gay. Had always been. Always would be. That was the only way they'd been able to be friends so long. Maybe she wasn't the most perceptive person in the world — she could find a nail in a lake blindfolded, but when it came to other people she was a blunt instrument — but this? This was weird and unbelievable.

'Well,' Tig said, 'what do you think?'

'What do I think? I think…' she shook her head '… that if you're saying what I think you're saying, which is pretty weird, to be honest, but if you mean it I've got to say no.'

'No?'

'Look, you know what it's been like for me, Tig. I'm just…' She searched for the word. 'I'm cut off. Since the accident I can't think like that. I'm just…' She sighed. Fuck. This was all so bloody clumsy. 'I mean, Tig, for God's sake, you're supposed to be gay.'

He pushed back his chair and held up his hands, giving a laugh, a sort of 'I knew this would happen and I'm laughing at how good I am at predicting things.' There was tension in his jaw, but his eyes weren't angry. 'Listen. Don't worry about it. I swear — you have a think about it.' His tongue moved around inside his mouth as if an object was in there, or a taste he was trying to push out. 'You think about it and when you're ready you tell me. OK?'

'OK,' she murmured, still staring, shell-shocked, at his weird offset eyes. 'OK. I will.'

And then, to cover her discomfort, she turned away, looking for something to do. She picked up her bag and shuffled through it, taking longer than she needed. After a few moments, when her face felt a bit cooler, she closed her fingers over the crumpled photo. For a moment she considered leaving it in her bag. Get the meeting with the restaurant owner over and tell Tig about Ian Mallows another day. But no. It had to be done. There was a world of trouble in it if she didn't. She placed the photo face down next to him on the desk, not meeting Tig's eyes.

He paused. 'What's this?'

She took a deep breath. She knew what he was going to say: 'That's one of my clients. Why're you showing me his photo — think I don't see the ugly bastard enough?' She turned the photo over.

Tig's face went blank. There was a long, long silence. Then he shrugged. 'What? What am I supposed to be saying? Show me a geezer's photo and what're you waiting for me to say?'

'You've never seen him before?'

'No. Am I supposed to have?'

'He's not one of your clients?'

'No.'

She let her breath out and gave a small laugh, feeling a bit better now. 'Thank fuck,' she muttered. 'At least something's going right today.' She zipped the photo back into the holdall and picked up her fleece. And that was when the community centre's doorbell began to echo round the building.

19

At the community-centre door in Mangotsfield Caffery was tired. A niggling ache had started in his legs, and while he waited for someone to answer the bell he pushed two ibuprofen into his mouth and dry-swallowed them. He'd have liked a cigarette and to lie down somewhere. Or to be with one of the City Road girls — anywhere except here, waiting to sit through another interview with a reluctant drugs counsellor.

The meeting at HQ that afternoon had turned into a sterile exercise in man management. Now that drugs were in the equation, the steam had gone out of the inquiry. He'd spent the time gazing at the sprinklers and trimmed lawns of Valley Road HQ, half listening to the SIO and half thinking about those forty names, twenty locations and seventeen counselling services waiting to be visited. For a moment his spirits had been raised when he heard from Kingswood that there'd been a message about the purple fibres found in Ian Mallows's fingernails. But it was just a memo to let him know the Chepstow lab had agreed with the Portishead lab that the fibres were from a carpet and wanted to do expensive gas chromatography tests before they gave him any more information.