Powers took off his glasses and peered at the photograph.
‘See it? His hair?’
‘It’s been cut.’
‘Shaved. Remind you of anything?’
Powers frowned again. He took the photograph off the wall and turned it over. It was stamped by the Audio-Visual unit at Portishead. ‘Where did you say it happened?’
‘Quarry number eight. Down near Elf’s Grotto.’
‘And it’s the hair that’s the important factor? Because it’s the same as what happened to Dundas?’
‘The same person did it. The marks are almost identical.’
‘So?’
Caffery gave him a grim smile. ‘The pathologist, being a pathologist, is typically vague about when Jakes died. But he’s admitted that whoever rolled up and stole his clothes did it a minimum of six hours after death – there’s livor mortis to prove that. The roommate says it’s six a.m. when Jakes leaves his room. We don’t know how he gets to the quarry but it’s got to take at least an hour, probably more, assuming he doesn’t stop on the way, which gives us seven a.m., so our thief has to come along at one p.m. at the absolute earliest. Meanwhile Brown was in that place,’ he jabbed a finger at the screen, ‘at two that afternoon. I saw the bastard with my own eyes. Can you really see him cruising out to the quarry, shaving Jakes’s head and winging it back to the other side of Bristol within an hour?’
‘I take it these are on the quiet, these timings the pathologist’s given you. I can’t picture him writing any of those in the report. They never commit when it comes to time of death.’
‘You’re right. But I don’t need his say-so. Vodaphone coughed up Jakes’s phone records. They showed calls made on his mobile at eight p.m. that night. Brown had been in custody for five hours by then.’
Powers lifted the blind and glanced outside. One or two reporters had taken up permanent residence outside since the Kitson case had come to MCIU. He stared at them for a while. Then he dropped the blind and gave his DI a long look. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘A week. A week on this. Give me two men and a week off from the Kitson case. I want to know how Brown cut Ben Jakes’s hair when he was twenty miles away at the time. I want to know what he wanted the hair bracelet for. And…’
‘And?’
‘And I want to know what prosthetics you’d have to use to make a human being look like that.’
4
Caffery left the MCIU offices at half past ten. He used the back entrance and walked round the side, away from the Kitson reporters, and straight into the low-ceilinged car park. It was sheltered there, but even so he walked fast, head down, collar up. He didn’t get into his car, an unmarked fleet Mondeo, but stopped, facing it, thighs just touching the bodywork, and took a moment to scan the car park, checking that the shadows behind the other cars were lying flat and still. After a while he crouched, looked under the car. Then he straightened, opened the car, got in and central locked the doors.
However they’d managed it, whatever tricks they’d used, the players on Operation Norway had convinced people they were seeing something they couldn’t explain. Something that made them nervous. Some of the earlier witnesses didn’t have a name for it – they could only describe the glimpses they’d had: something human-like, but too small and stunted to be properly human. Then there had been the witnesses who had a name: a name that came from the darkest parts of the darkest continent. A Zulu word that Caffery hadn’t spoken out loud to Superintendent Powers because the sound of it put hairs up on the back of his neck.
Tokoloshe.
Three simple syllables, but they meant something powerful to those who believed. They meant deformity, brokenness. They meant all African superstition in one creature: the size of a large baboon with the body of a monkey and the face of a human. A witch’s familiar, a creature from the heart of the velds. Sitting in the shadows. Watching, unblinking.
Caffery couldn’t square the shadowy figure in the video with Johnny Brown, but the alternative explanation was, of course, close to insanity: a theory he would never vocalize, even to himself. But he couldn’t help thinking about whatever it was he was hunting by that eerie Zulu word: Tokoloshe.
Now he leant over, flicked open the glove compartment and checked through the things in there. All front-line officers were issued the basic self-protection standards – quik cuffs, a pepper spray, and an ASP, a metal baton that could break bones. He’d been on the receiving end of an ASP during the Norway arrests at the beginning of the week. It had hurt like a bastard, but it was laughable as protection when the lowlifes out there were carrying Mach 11s and Magnums. Now it lay on top of a buff envelope file in the compartment. Underneath it, wrapped in oilcloth, was a gun.
Five years ago, back in London, he’d had a dodgy mate working on Operation Trident who’d put him in touch with a character who’d lived in Tulse Hill all his life, but spoke, inexplicably, as if he’d been born in South Central LA and never took off his LOCs so you never knew exactly what he was thinking. When Caffery had turned up at his place he’d taken him into the kitchen and shown him two guns in a shoebox under the liner of the pedal bin: a model 17 Glock and a stainless-steel AMT 45 Hardballer that was so shiny it looked as if it was meant to be worn as jewellery. The dealer couldn’t believe it when Caffery didn’t jump at the Hardballer, because he personally thought it was the shiza and it wouldn’t be hanging around long because the next person through the door would be snapping it up, if Caffery didn’t have the good sense to take it off him. In the end Caffery did take the fashion-statement gun. Not because he liked it but because the Glock was the same as a force-issue weapon, and although he didn’t intend getting touched for it, you had to look at every eventuality. A force-issue gun would point fingers at the wrong people. It was better to get caught with a street gun, even if it was an embarrassing bit of bling.
Usually the Hardballer was kept under the bag in the kitchen pedal bin, because if there was one thing Caffery had respected about the Tulse Hill dealer, it was his choice of hiding place. He’d be screwed if he used the damn thing and, anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was there were times when he needed the sense of security it gave him. Just knowing it was there. This week was one of those times.
He closed the glove compartment and looked out of the window at the walls, checking the shadows again, concentrating on the ones at waist height. He hadn’t told Powers the whole story: he hadn’t mentioned that it wasn’t only the video that unnerved him. He hadn’t said that ever since Operation Norway he’d had the feeling someone was watching him. If it didn’t sound insane he’d say the Tokoloshe had been following him. The Tokoloshe? In the streets of Bristol?
It had started in this car. Late one night, more than a week ago, he’d been parked in a deserted alley in the centre of Bristol late and someone, or something, had leapt on the car, slammed into the bonnet. It had been gone too quickly to see what it was, but he’d had the impression of something small, something close to the ground, scurrying away. That had been the beginning. Now he imagined the damned thing everywhere. In the shadows, under cars. Even in the mirror when he shaved in the morning.
He looked at his watch again. It was ten thirty-five. Only one victim had survived Operation Norway. He’d given the police a garbled statement on the day of the arrest, but now he was in Southmead Hospital, fighting for his life. The doctors weren’t letting anyone near him, especially not the police, stressing him with their questions.