Before Rochelle could answer Letitia turned on her heels, her fists balled, and went into the sitting room. She said something to her sister, who got up, shooting her mother a pointed look. Then there was the sound of their feet on the stairs and a door banging.
After a few moments Rochelle breathed out. She looked despairingly at Caffery. 'You got kids, Mr Caffery? Any little ones?'
He shook his head. He was thinking about what Letitia had said: He reckoned he was lucky him and his friend had someone who knew what to do about it. It was making him think about things he hadn't thought about until now.
'Well,' said Rochelle, 'let me give you some advice. Don't. Don't even think about it.'
Outside Rochelle's it was a cool spring day, the acid-green ornamental trees and the tended grass in the development every now and then giving the faintest stir in the breeze. But for Caffery, sitting in the car, his hands resting on the steering-wheel, it might as well have been mid-January. He wasn't thinking about the blossom on the branches or the way the sun was so high in the sky or the slight rise in temperature. He was thinking about circles. About rings.
Criminal behaviour was like a sponge: it sucked others into it. Almost every idiot he'd ever picked up over the years had had a little coterie attached. If you thought about it, it wasn't much different from any other social group. Every ring had a different structure, a different size, a different satellite configuration, but they had one thing in common: they had a leader. Sometimes the group was so loose the MC didn't even realize he was boss. But on the whole, in most rings, the one who was in charge knew exactly what he was doing.
Somewhere, out there in Bristol, someone knew more than was good for them about the African continent. They might be British, they might be African. They certainly knew a little too much about African ritual and belief; they knew very well how deep superstition ran in people; and, more importantly, they knew how much money could be attached to fear. It wouldn't be difficult to pinpoint wealthy Africans living in the country.
Nor would it be difficult to hire someone, some poor bastard who'd never have the luxury of normality from all Caffery'd been told, to loop up some ridiculous fucking dildo, grease themselves up and appear to the right person at the right time. Nothing too obvious, a fleeting glimpse. A shadow. Just enough to convince someone superstitious enough they were being stalked by a demon. And then the brains in the operation would go in for the kill, providing the goods to ward off the Tokoloshe, keep it away from the business. Human blood. And for proof that the goods were genuine, a video, real or a clever fake.
Mabuza. Caffery hadn't met him but he remembered his voice — sort of even and measured, a little too educated for comfort. He pulled out his work phone and stabbed in a number. He was going to get Interpol to track down Dlamini and then he'd get the surveillance guys to knock on Mabuza's door. They were going to ask, respectfully, whether he'd consent to the house being searched. And then, also respectfully, they'd offer him a lift to the station. Because Caffery was going to have to do this interview a little earlier than he'd hoped.
The phone clicked through, and he let his eyes wander over to the Nailsea skyline. He was thinking about a human being with dwarf legs: a squat half animal that ran through the streets at human knee height. And he was thinking about African witchcraft, secret rituals being practised behind closed doors. Someone was engineering it, he was sure, but he still had to blink to make sure he was seeing only sky and buildings, because right now, sitting here in the sunshine, he wasn't sure he'd ever get the image of the Tokoloshe out of his mind.
32
On Kaiser's sofa — eighteen hours since the ibogaine trip had begun, Flea came to life again and began to remember who she was and why she was there. She felt as if she'd been to a different planet, as if half of her was still out there somewhere, struggling to find its way back into her body. She sat up gingerly, blinking in the first grey light of morning filtering through the window. After a while she pulled her feet up on to the sofa and slowly, slowly, pulled off her socks.
The problem with her feet had started a few days after the accident, and now it had got to the point that she was so ashamed she wouldn't take her shoes off if anyone was watching. Her feet seemed veined and misshapen, awkwardly crabbed like a monkey's or a lemur's — they made her think of the hand she'd brought to the surface from under the harbour, the brutal way it had been removed from the body. She squeezed the webbed skin experimentally between her thumb and forefinger and, briefly, it seemed to liquefy, to run away leaving her toes free and independent. She stopped moving, trying to keep still, waiting for the drug to stop working. After a while her vision cleared and the skin was back, tethering her toes together. Life was so unpredictable. The things that stayed longest in your mind were always the things you hadn't foreseen.
She pulled on her socks and was about to roll back on the sofa, when something made her stop. Someone was watching her. In the doorway, under the rolled-up plastic sheeting, a figure stood perfectly still.
For a moment it was as if nothing in her body moved, not her heart or her lungs, because she was looking at a creature, a dead creature that should have been lying on the ground, but instead was standing up in the doorway. Its clothing was billowing round it, just like Mum's in Boesmansgat. Its face was a bony mass.
'Mum?' she whispered. 'Mum?'
'There now,' the dead animal said, and its voice was not Mum's but Kaiser's. 'Flea?'
There was a pause when she didn't know what to say. Then, in a hoarse voice, she whispered, 'Kaiser?'
The creature moved, turning its face, and as it did, Kaiser materialized from inside it, smiling out from the corpse. Her vision cleared and it was just Kaiser again, dressed in an unfamiliar white shirt, looking very tired. 'Phoebe?' he said, coming into the room. 'How are we feeling?'
She shook her head, not taking her eyes off him.
'Are you all right?'
'Yes. I mean… it's still there. The drug — it's still there.' She licked her lips, trying not to think about the death mask. 'I mean you — just now. I thought…'
'Yes?' he said slowly, taking a step into the room. She'd forgotten how tall he was. How tall, and how heavy his head was.
'Nothing.' She rubbed her eyes and tucked her feet under her on the sofa. 'It was just the drug.'
He was holding a glass of water and he handed it to her now. He sat down on the sofa next to her, making it bow with his weight. She tried not to look at him. She wanted to say: 'They're not at the bottom.' But she didn't. Instead she sipped the water and kept track of him out of the corner of her eye, thinking of the animal skull.
'I was sick,' she said, after a while. 'You told me I'd be sick.'
'It gets most people like that.'
She looked at the bowl on the floor. 'You cleaned it up for me. I didn't even hear you come in.' She blinked. Everything was familiar, yet strange: the edges on all the objects were hazy and brown, crawling a little as if they were outlined with a column of ants.
'Would you like some more water?'
'I've got a headache,' she said numbly. There was something about his shirt that she thought she should mention, but her head hurt too much. 'A headache.' She wiped her face with her palms. She took some deep breaths. 'Kaiser. Do you — do you remember my feet?'
'No.'
'At Bushman's Hole, I didn't dive because…'
'Because you'd cut your feet on some glass. Yes. I remember that.'
'Except,' she murmured, 'except… I didn't. I didn't cut them.'
He laughed gently. 'Well, I saw blood. I helped you dress them. I pulled a piece of glass out from between your toes. I don't think that was your imagination.'