'Death?'
'Yes. Death. Oh, you've still got a choice. But at the moment the choice you're making is the same as mine.'
'The same choice? I'm not making any of the same choices as you.'
The Walking Man smiled and tossed the last log on to the fire. 'Yes, you are. And for now you've chosen death. Yes. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for death.'
Caffery opened his mouth to say something, but the Walking Man's words stopped him. He sat there, his mouth still half open.
The Walking Man laughed at his face. 'I know. A shock, isn't it, when you first turn round and see the bridge you're crossing? A shock to realize you're giving up on life. That what you're really hoping for is death.'
Caffery closed his mouth. 'No. That's wrong. I'm not the same as you.'
'Yes, you are Jack Caffery, Policeman. You're exactly the same as I am. The only difference is that my eyes are open.' He used his filthy thumb and forefinger to open the lids, revealing the reddish tops and bottoms of the eyeballs. He was suddenly monstrous in the firelight, every night monster, every chimera. 'See? I'm not looking the other way. I know I'm trying to die. And you?' He laughed. 'You don't even suspect it yet.'
31
17 May
Once, when Caffery had first started living with Rebecca in his family's three-bedroom terrace house in south-east London, after a particular bastard of an argument, she'd taken his face in her hands and said, in a voice that was tender, not angry: 'Jack, sometimes being with you isn't like being with someone who's still alive. It's like being with someone who's dying.'
For four years he'd kept those words contained somewhere in the back of his head, trying not to forget them but trying harder not to think about them too much, so they got like a memory of her perfume, or a half-remembered tune. Then, of course, along came the Walking Man and jumpstarted the memory.
It had opened something in him. It was as if a new channel had appeared in his head, making the back of his neck ache. Somehow, without understanding how, he knew the Walking Man would point to Keelie and the other girls on City Road and say they were about death, about him hoping for death. And then he'd point directly at Caffery's job. 'And as for that,' he'd say, 'more than anything else that is about your death.'
The next morning in his Kingswood office, a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the convenience store on the desk as he opened the orange courier's package that had come overnight from Marilyn, Caffery was thinking about his job, thinking about it as a kind of death. Marilyn had scribbled a note to him on a bit of Met stationery: 'Call if you need any more ADVICE Love M x.'
'Thanks, Marilyn,' he said, with a wry smile. He crumpled up the paper and was about to put it into the bin, then changed his mind. He found Sellotape and taped it to the wall so that Marilyn could do what she'd always wanted to do — monitor him constantly. Then he went back to the package, slowly pulling out the various wallets and bound folders. There was everything in here he could want: photocopied theses on African ritual; a folder of newspaper cuttings about Adam, the boy in the Thames; a list of contacts at universities in the UK and abroad. One, he noticed, was in Bristol. There was also a disk labelled 'Swalcliffe.pdf' in a clear pink cover. An Adobe Acrobat presentation. He slotted it into the computer.
Marilyn, he decided, as the Metropolitan Police logo came up on the screen, had put this together herself. She'd been a HOLMES inputter when they'd worked together and she'd always loved her computers. It was designed as a lecture, with bigger files appended to the presentation through hyperlinks, and that morning, as the sun got higher in the sky, as the Kingswood station came to life around him and people came and went from the shops outside his window, he silently blessed Marilyn for her nerdishness. In two hours he learned more than he'd ever known about a continent that had been a mystery to him for years.
Muti, like she'd said, was a much bigger picture than he'd imagined. It started on the ground with witch doctors 'throwing the bones', casting sacred objects, bones, beans or stones, in a circle to divine the needs of the client. From the witch doctor's divination sprang the remedy, and of these the list was bewildering: there was bushbaby fur for babies who cried too much, chitons to stop your partner cheating on you, pangolin, porcupine fish, aardvark claw. Every part of almost every animal, it seemed, had a place in muti.
Caffery tried to read the page to the end, but the words blurred after twenty entries so he went back to the main lecture. When he clicked on it, he knew instantly he'd moved into a darker place: human body parts. The first thing that came up was a picture of a human skull, laid out on a pathologist's table, a measuring tape next to it. He read the text carefully, giving it time to sink in. Most muti human body parts were stolen from corpses, but the muti from the already dead was weak compared to that from the living: the medicine would be more powerful if the victim was alive when the mutilation happened, the louder the screams the better, and of the living by far the most powerful medicine came from a child. It was all about purity.
He looked away from the screen, suddenly overloaded, his eyes tired. He took time to spoon some sugar into his coffee and watch it make a little island and slowly sink. Vaguely, he remembered hearing that in South Africa six men had been charged with raping a nine-month-old baby, believing that sex with it would cure them of AIDS. The thought made parts of his mind ache.
The next section of the lecture defined the difference between human sacrifice, in which the death of the person was the most important thing and would appease a deity, and muti murder, where the aim was the harvest of body parts for use in traditional medicine. Brains endow the client with knowledge. The breasts and genitals of either sex bestow virility. A nose or eyelid can be used to poison an enemy. The next slide showed a piece of severed flesh lying on a towel. It wasn't until he read the caption that he understood what he was looking at. A penis can bring success in horse-racing.
'Christ,' he muttered, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. He'd have liked a whisky instead of the coffee, but if he let himself have one there'd be another on the heels of the first and before he knew it the day would be in the toilet. He scrolled down, looking for mention of human blood, but there was nothing, so, thinking of his visit to Rochelle's, he searched for the Tokoloshe.
At first he put in the wrong spelling, TOCKALOSH, and the search engine came up with zero. He tried two more spellings, then TOKOLOSHE and this time the computer blinked and whirred and came up with a result. He found the section and had read a short way through when he had the urge to stand and pull the blind down because suddenly he didn't feel comfortable in the office and he didn't like the way he could be seen by anyone on the street.
A Tokoloshe, the Acrobat file told him, was a sprite, a witch's familiar. Left to its own devices it was no more than a nuisance, but if it came under the power of a witch it became a danger, a thing feared and reviled. As Rochelle had said, some believed a bowl of human blood would appease a Tokoloshe, but there were other ways of protecting yourself: a cat, or an image of a cat washing its face, was enough to keep it at bay, or you could cover your skin with grease made from Tokoloshe fat, which you could buy from a witch doctor. Marilyn had scanned in an article about two men in South Africa arrested on an armed robbery. In their car the police had found a human skull with a piece of meat inside it. The robbers had stolen the skull from a grave and the meat was a meal for a Tokoloshe they believed was protecting them.