Ritual

'Subtle difference.'

'Subtle, yes, but still different. For muti, we don't automatically think about human body parts. The place we start mostly, Jack, is with the Endangered Species Act.'

'How come?'

'Muti's usually about animal parts. Every animal's got a different power. I mean baboons. I never even knew what a baboon was, Jack, until I was in this job — can you believe it? — but now I do. No one likes the baboon in Africa. They're like foxes, really cunning and nasty, and no one thinks twice about killing them. But because football's a rising thing over there you can sell a baboon's hands on the open market. They're supposed to help a goalkeeper stop goals.'

Caffery turned his chair round, pulled up the Guardian intelligence database and entered Endangered Species as a search term. He waited for the computer to crank its way through the millions of entries. 'Marilyn,' he said, pulling his chair nearer the screen. 'Have you got anything you can send over to me?'

'I'm doing it as I talk. I'm sending you an info pack we've made up for distribution. Nottingham's got one from us already and Manchester — this thing's really picking up across the country. I won't put it through the registry, I'll courier it today. There's a couple of bibliographies in it, contacts for academics, practitioners, that sort of thing. But most of all there are press releases and cuttings.' She paused. 'And, Jack?'

'What?'

'You're going to be really careful, aren't you, how you tread? In London this is a seriously hot issue right now. The right-wing press — you can picture it, can't you? — they've made it a race thing, like every African, every black church, every Pentecostal minister is doing ritual abuse, exorcisms, the works. Truth is, there've been maybe a handful of cases in the last couple of years, two or three that've stuck, but because there've been kids involved, the press are getting all their hot buttons pushed.'

Caffery nodded slowly. There was so much tension in the country's big cities, the streets felt like any spark could take the whole lid off. In front of him the computer was stacking up results: there were already five entries. He put his glasses on and pulled the chair closer to the screen. 'Marilyn,' he said, 'you get that info pack off with the couriers and you say hello to everyone at home. OK?'

'Yeah,' she said drily. 'I mean, it's not like you've got any family of your own to say hello to.'

'Marilyn,' he sighed, half smiling at her cheek, 'it's always so good to talk to you. Thank you for your support.'

When they'd said goodbye he returned to the screen. The searching had stopped and of the ten in the list he could see immediately which entry was going to interest him. The report was sketchy, just the bare minimum because the case had never got to court, but it must have set off alarm bells for the intelligence officer who had logged it, because the attachments were detailed. Caffery scrolled through it. It had been originated nine months ago by a traffic officer near the Clifton Suspension Bridge. He'd stopped someone for dodgy brake lights and when he came round to speak to the driver, there, hanging from a ribbon on the rear-view, was a decaying vulture's head.

Caffery opened the photograph attached: a grizzled head like an outsized, misshapen chicken. Its thin neck was carefully tied with red ribbon, and there was a National Lottery ticket lodged in its beak. At great expense the police had sent the vulture to be identified by Bristol Zoo, who'd sent back a series of pictures along with, he could guess, a sneery note. The 'vulture' was a fake. The dissection photos were attached to the report showing how, once the skin was peeled back, it turned out to be the skull of a small sheep filed down at the snout to resemble a beak and wrapped in shavings of chicken meat. Big laughs all round, but the point here was that the driver had thought it was a vulture. He refused to say where or why he'd got it. Said it had been in the car when he'd bought it and he'd never got round to removing it, but the police officer, who'd been watching a programme the night before about witchcraft, guessed he was looking at a fetish.

Caffery scrolled through the report for the name of the driver. Kwanele Dlamini. He half closed his eyes and read it again, a little smile at the edges of his mouth. Dlamini. It sounded the way he imagined a Zulu chieftain to sound. African.

So, then — he pushed his chair back and got his jacket — it seemed there was a little visiting to do. Just a little visiting.

27

Thom wanted to write Flea a note so she didn't forget he was going to borrow her car. He needed to be reminded of appointments like this, and it made him think she would too, so he insisted on sitting at the table and putting it on a Post-it in his laborious handwriting. Flea stood at the sink, her arms crossed, studying his faintly bruised-looking eyes, the dark lashes lying diagonally across the pale skin, the way he crabbed himself over the paper to write. His colour had come back, but somehow she knew it would never return properly. If someone had asked her when she'd last seen her brother, she'd have answered truthfully: on the day of the accident two years ago.

It wasn't that she hadn't seen him physically since; in fact, she hadn't left his side, not through all the hospitalization in Danielskuil when they'd told her he might die, or during the dreadful journey home via Cape Town with the air hostess who wouldn't give her a paracetamol for him because the airline was afraid of being sued, or during the eight weeks of the investigation into their parents' death. She'd seen the physical Thom, his body, the shell he was in, but her brother was gone. You could look into his eyes and see nothing. So she would say that the last time she had seen him was that day at Boesmansgat when he emerged from the sinkhole crying and vomiting, thrashing his arms in the water.

Under him yawned the dark hole, a hundred and fifty metres wide, and three hundred metres deep. Like an oubliette for a sleeping predator. It was a grave too. Bushman's Hole had taken three divers in the last decade, and now two more: David and Jill Marley. Dad had gone first, heading straight down into the dark. Mum followed. Thom had made desperate grabs for them, and for a few moments he'd even had a precarious grip on Mum's right ankle, but he couldn't keep hold. It was as if, determined to get to the bottom, they had both turned face down into the gloom. Which was unthinkable because the bottom was a hundred and fifty metres deeper than they'd intended and they had both known it was suicide to go even ten metres deeper than the dive plan.

They'd planned it scientifically, because if David and Jill Marley knew anything it was respect for the water. Bushman's Hole was the pinnacle for them, the height of a lifetime's addiction to extreme sport diving. It had started a long time before the kids came along, so long ago that Flea didn't know the exact equation it had sprung from. But she did know one thing: it was Dad's gig. Mum had gone along with it, had got an enthusiasm of sorts going, but Dad was the addict, fatally attracted to it, and Dad who, in his quiet moments in the study, dreamed he was in the deep.

He'd been wearing a video camera on his helmet in Bushman's Hole. He'd have filmed his descent, and his own death. But the South African investigators had never found the bodies or the camera, and with only Thom's fractured memories to go on they couldn't do much more than put the Marleys' death down to either 'narcosis' from a miscalculation in the deep-dive gas content or possibly a hyperoxic blackout. The British coroner, who'd got permission from the home secretary to hold an inquest without the bodies, ruled out narcosis — the disorienting euphoric effect nitrogen can have at too much pressure. Because the 'Trimix' combination of gases the Marleys were using was specifically designed to combat narcosis, the coroner guessed instead that David Marley had begun to breathe too fast and deeply, shutting down the sensitive carbon-dioxide receptor in the back of his neck, which had knocked him out. When he'd started to drop Jill had tried to stop him — that much they knew — and maybe descending so quickly she'd held her breath, causing the Trimix system's oxygen sensor to over-deliver oxygen. In effect she'd died in exactly the same way as David had: from hyperoxia, too much oxygen.