Caffery lowered the cigarette, staring at her. ‘And,’ he said, his mouth dry, ‘what did Amos Chipeta look like?’
‘You said you knew.’
‘I said he was small. That’s all I know.’
‘Well, he is – a dwarf, I’d say. But not just your usual midget. He was a total freak – you know, real Elephant Man freak. He used to have this parka he wore with the hood up over his face so you couldn’t see what he looked like and he was always hanging around. Watching us. Then one evening he comes over – he’s saved up all this money. Offers me two times my usual and I’m, like, no fucking way! I’m, like, oh, that’s so minging, just the thought of it. No way am I sleeping with a mutant. Not even for twice.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Dunno. Couple of weeks ago.’ She dragged on the cigarette again. ‘So? Are you saying he was connected with the thing in Easton?’
‘Maybe.’
She shivered. ‘Gross.’
Caffery smoked the cigarette, thinking of the figure in the Norway video, hunched over. There is, he thought, a place where myth and reality merge. Amos Chipeta. Maybe the Tokoloshe had just taken a step out of the shadows.
‘Keelie, do you know why he’d have any interest in me?’
‘Yeah.’ She made the word go up and down. Yeee-aahh. Like: Why’re you asking me this Raass question? ‘He wants to be like you, hun.’ She leant forward, head on one side, smiling too widely at him. ‘Wants your mojo, baby. Cos you is cool, Daddy-O.’
‘I’ve got my eye on the clock, Keelie.’
She sighed and slouched back in the chair. ‘He just wants what you’ve got.’
‘Why me?’
‘Cos I’d been with you. He’s jealous.’
‘How’d he know I’d been with you?’
‘Cos I told him. Duh.’
‘You have, what, ten different men a night?’
‘That’s a good night. A very good night. Try five.’
‘Five different men a night. Is he following all of them?’
‘No.’
‘Then why’d he single me out?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
Keelie let the smoke out of her mouth and looked at him for a long time, almost as if she pitied him. Then she struggled, stood up and dropped the cigarette butt into the sink. It made a small hiss.
‘You want a BJ?’
‘Time’s up.’ He held his wrist over to her to show his watch. ‘Nine o’clock.’
‘I’ll make more time.’
He looked at the side of her face, her eyelashes lowered. He saw the need there and for a moment he wanted to reach for her. But he didn’t.
‘That’s OK. But thank you, Keelie. Seriously. Thank you.’
‘Are we finished, then?’
‘We’re finished.’
He got up, went to the sink and pulled back the curtain. It was late but the sky through the buildings was a fluorescent blue. Almost indigo. It was worse in the summer, this job the girls did. This thing that men like him did. Somehow it felt worse. In the winter it was OK to live in the dark, to keep chapped skin covered and never look in each other’s eyes.
In the summer it felt like an insult.
24
Caffery wasn’t sure he would stay in Bristol. Like a boat slipping anchor, the release from what had been holding him in London for years – Penderecki, the paedophile who’d murdered his brother Ewan – had sent him to wander, not to rest. He’d sold his house in Brockley and come west with an inflated bank account and no desire to put down roots. He’d gone into a letting agency and put a deposit on the first place he could move into straight away, without even seeing a picture of it. It had turned out to be a little stone-built cottage just in sight of the ancient and lonely Priddy Circles.
Priddy was a strange place adrift in the damp Mendips. Unpopulated and bleak, the area was pocked with lead mines, sink holes and legends. Local people swore that Jesus himself had once visited the neolithic circles. They said he’d floated in a low boat up from Glastonbury, across what had then been sea, standing proud in the bow. His uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, had been in the stern. And who was to say they were wrong? ‘As sure as the Lord walked in Priddy,’ Caffery had heard a woman in the local newsagent’s say only two days ago. To her it was like saying, ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
Caffery hadn’t settled there. The rooms were too small, and in the morning he had to bend to look out of his bedroom window, it was set so low in the wall. The thatched roof was like the picture on a chocolate box from a distance, but he was woken most mornings by the scratch of squirrels nesting in it and one had already found a way of creeping into the house and crapping on the kitchen table. The cottage hadn’t welcomed Caffery so he had agreed to dislike it in return: most of his boxes were still in the garage and even two months along he hadn’t unpacked many of his clothes. They lay gathering dust on the spare-room bed in their suit protectors. Maybe girls like Keelie were more than just his way of staying out of relationships. Maybe they were also a way of stopping him coming here. To the emptiness, the smells and the shadows.
He got back to the cottage at nine and went around opening windows to let out the squirrelly smell. He knew he should eat something. Instead he went into the lounge and filled a tumbler with Glenmorangie. He paused to consider the glass, then picked up the bottle of malt and carried it up the narrow, lumpy little staircase, his head bent. The ceilings here were low, the plaster was old and sagging, probably made of horsehair, and he’d learnt not to try to put pictures on the wall. But the bedroom was about OK. There was a satellite hook and a TV on an old box chest near the bed.
He put the bottle on the bedstand, pulled off his shoes and socks, tie, shirt and trousers, clicked the TV on and lay down in his underwear, his hands behind his head, staring at the screen. There was a programme on about a women’s football team from Iceland. One of the players had a harelip that had been badly operated on. Birth was a lottery, he thought. The tiniest mutation in a gene could create a monster. The Icelandic woman. The Tokoloshe. Amos Chipeta.
A check through the Guardian database and Interpol had confirmed it: Clement Chipeta had a brother, Amos, who’d left Tanzania at the same time and was still unaccounted for. He’d grown up in the mangroves of the Rufiji delta and, before he’d turned twenty, had found a living with the gangs who operated illegal divers – some without breathing apparatus – to raid the shipwrecks. None of it was covered by local law and there was a lot of money in the operations. For Amos it was just the beginning of the criminal career that had brought him into contact with the trade in body parts and eventually to the UK. Last December someone called Andrew Chipeta had gone to a GP in Southall, London, asking for referral to a specialist. The doctor had looked at the deformed spine, the overlarge ribcage, the gorilla-sized jaw, and was sifting a range of diagnoses in his head, scoliosis, kyphosis, diastrophic dysplasia, but ‘Andrew’ had left in a hurry when the doctor had asked the formal questions they’d put to any new patient: his address, his circumstances, his age and country of origin.
Amos Chipeta. So who or what was the Tokoloshe? Just a young man crippled by a birth defect? Out there somewhere now, existing God only knew how and trying to find help in a cold, alien country – but still able to find beauty and clarity and maybe even love in the face of a twenty-quid-a-trick prostitute from Hartcliffe? Or was he a monster? A half-human sloping off in mud and dirty water, making a living from raiding graves and cutting the hair from corpses.
Caffery closed one eye and then the other, letting the TV light prism through the liquid gold in his glass. Years ago back in London – he’d have been about fifteen at the time – he was in love with one of the girls at his school. Couldn’t remember her name now. But he could remember the name of the guy she was in love with: Tom Cadwall. He could remember, too, breaking into the Cadwalls’ garden early one morning. Climbing a tree. Hanging in the branches like a bloody possum. He’d stayed there all day, hoping to see inside Tom Cadwall’s bedroom. He wanted to know what Cadwall had that he didn’t.