Free Ritual by Mo Hayder Page B

up with a parent.

'What?' he says, and his voice comes out a little hoarse because all of a sudden he wants to touch Skinny's hair. 'What do you want?'

'I'm sorry. Plenty sorry.'

'What you talking about?'

He feels Skinny swallow. He can actually feel the cartilage in the man's throat move up and down against his arm.

'Them's wanting you to scream.'

Mossy can feel the thick beat of the hash going through his veins and, for a moment, he thinks he's going to laugh. 'Scream?' he goes, half smiling. 'You fucking joking? Why've I got to scream?'

'It's all I ask you. When I pull out your blood you scream. OK?'

Mossy cranes his neck, trying to see into the adjoining room, looking for a pair of eyes in the dark, trying to catch out whoever's watching. He can't see anything, only the glint of the metal gate, which he's one hundred per cent is locked. He laughs, deep and knowing. Now he gets it.

'Hey, sweetheart,' he calls, his voice echoing into the dark spaces. 'I know you're out there. Can't see you, like, but I know you're there. And let me just tell you – I like perverts. I do. I love you all. I'll do the best show you've ever seen. Got your video running, have you?'

As if in answer, from out of the darkness comes a click and a whirr and a red light blinks on and off. Mossy puts his head back and laughs. He's on home ground now. He's been videoed by them all – the ones who want to watch themselves and the ones who are so ashamed, either because of what they're doing or because they know their dick size will humiliate them, that they have to video him and get off later when he's gone and can't laugh. Now he gets why the price is so good, and it's something he doesn't care about. He can relax.

Skinny shifts. He sits up and turns on the tap. His face is close, and Mossy wonders if they could be friends. 'Scream,' whispers Skinny. 'Now. Scream.'

And Mossy does. He drops his head back on the scratchy sofa and screams.

11
14 May

'Don't need to ask what this is about.' The council sub-contractors, three men in bright red jackets marked SITA, were manoeuvring their inflatable raft against the edge of the pontoon, one of them assembling a jetting machine, snapping on the jet head to the orange flexipipe. One was holding his finger under the drain, watching the steady dribble of water on to it while his colleague was testing the jet. 'Only question is, how far up.'

Caffery was on the pontoon, looking down thoughtfully at the handfuls of sludge Flea'd pulled out of the drain. 'You what?'

The contractor was a big red-faced man with a shaved head and three piercings in his right ear. 'He's blocked, isn't he? The drain. See, a trickle like this on a sunny day and it means 'e's blocked somewhere.'

'How far up?'

'Wales?' He laughed. 'Cardiff? Don't worry. When we hit it you'll be the first to know.'

As they inserted the jet head Caffery studied the entrance to the drain and the long green tail of slime under it. Then he peered at the stuff on the pontoon between his feet. It was black, but ever since it had been pulled out he'd been thinking of the fatty white residue that had been clogging up Dennis Nilsen's drains back in the nineteen eighties. Everyone in the Met knew that story – the story of what the drain people had found. Human fat, as it turned out, from the sixteen bodies Nilsen had dismembered in his bedsit, boiled and flushed down the toilet.

'Figured out where the drain comes from yet?' he asked Flea. She had showered in the Station and was dressed in a navy fleece and combats, and now she was kneeling on the pontoon, inspecting the blueprint they'd had biked over from the Environment Agency. He came and crouched next to her, trying not to be conscious of the way the air changed near her, the way the smell of the drains was replaced by baby lotion and toothpaste.

'Where do these things lead?'

'Some of the drains let into the harbour, some into underground rivers – the Frome, or the moat – but just to