Ritual by Mo Hayder Read Free Book Online Page B

ill. But he's not being threatening and, anyway, there isn't enough of him to put up much of a fight – though he's wiry and doesn't look like he's a user so he'd have the edge if anything did kick off.

'You a vampire, then?' He laughs hoarsely, a little nervous. But Skinny keeps on looking into his eyes, all serious. So Mossy stops. He swallows. This is so fucking freaky. He uncurls Skinny's fingers from his arm.

'What're you going to do with my blood, then?' he asks tightly, because something about this is making him feel sick. 'What're you going to do with it? Drink it?'

7
13 May

Caffery came quicker than he'd meant to. Maybe it was the stress of the day, maybe the long hours, or maybe something else, but almost as soon as he was inside Keelie, her legs hooked up over his shoulders, it was over. She was lying on the back seat of the car with her skirt hitched up, holding the back of his head in both hands and pulling his face down so it was pressed against hers, and maybe she didn't want it to have been that quick because it took him a minute or two to get her to loosen her grip on him, untangling her fingers from his hair and moving her shoulders back. He knelt up in the well of the car, moved her legs and fell sideways on to the seat, one hand loosening the collar of his shirt, the other resting on his chest.

She didn't say anything so neither did he, just stared blankly out of the window, feeling his heart thudding under his ribcage, his pulse making him vaguely aware of a conversation he'd had three months ago. It was the day he'd left London, and when one of his colleagues had asked him, 'What the hell do you think you're going to do out there in the middle of nowhere with the woollies?' he'd answered, with no trace of a smile, 'Don't know. Probably fuck myself to death.'

A joke, of course, but now the words came back to him because he didn't know how else to explain what he was doing, seeing girls like Keelie week after week. He hadn't wanted to tell the truth: that he'd left London, the city he'd lived in most of his life, because one day he'd woken up to find he'd lost the only connection he had to the place – the disappearance, thirty years ago, of his only brother Ewan, age just nine. The question of what had happened to Ewan had been the only question in Caffery's life. Ever since he remembered, it had coloured everything he did, and for a long time he was sure the answers were in London, across the railway cutting at the back of the family garden, in the house of the ageing paedophile, Penderecki. Caffery obsessed about that house, the place he was sure Ewan had died, for years. Then suddenly, overnight, it had gone. Vanished into nothing. Yes, he still dreamed and thought about his brother. Yes, he still had the drive to find his body, but it wasn't London he felt connected to any more. He'd stopped wanting to stare out of his window at Penderecki's house, and he couldn't remember why he'd once thought he'd get an answer out of the damned place.

But he still wanted his job. He'd gone into the Metropolitan Police force because every case he solved felt a little bit more like balancing out what had happened to Ewan. And although he wasn't a ladder-climber – he'd got a jumpstart on the HPD scheme in the Met but at thirty-seven he didn't want to think about Chief Inspector exams – every conviction helped nail down the thing in his chest that kept him awake at night. His connection to London might be weakening, but the link to the firm stayed hard. He could do the job anywhere – even here, in Bristol. And, anyway, there was someone out here in the west that he hoped would help him untangle the Ewan equation a little further.

Next to him Keelie coughed and put her fingers to her throat, rubbing it a little as if it was sore. Then she put her index fingers into the corners of her eyes and wiped them, clearing out the caked make up. She pulled her skirt down from where it was rucked up round her waist