Ritual by Mo Hayder Page A

the door he had the chain on and seemed a bit shaken, as if maybe he'd been asleep. He was rubbing his eye with his knuckles, his compact body worked and toned in a black weightlifter's vest.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

'I'm sorry it took so long. Had a bad couple of days at work. You OK?'

When he was in jail his cellmate had poured bleach into Tig's eyes. The left had recovered, but in the right he'd developed secondary glaucoma, swelling the eyeball and swivelling the pupil to the side. It was always this eye he rubbed when he was on edge. She waited a minute while he went on digging his knuckle into it. Then she shivered, crossing her arms tightly and looking round at the deserted estate. 'Tig? Can you let me in?'

He hesitated, glanced over his shoulder into the flat. There were piles and piles of belongings crammed into the hallway and she knew he was embarrassed. Fifteen years ago Tig had been done for the attempted murder of an eighty-year-old woman while burgling her house. He'd been a heroin addict in those days, but he was a rare one: he'd cleaned up in jail and since his release he'd founded his own charity offering advice and sanctuary to street people trying to get clean. Through his work he'd developed contacts in the ethnic and refugee groups in the area, and had even, for a while, been felt out by Operation Atrium. An intelligence-led anti-crime operation, Atrium was targeting drugs-trafficking among Jamaican gangs, and white though he was, they'd researched Tig's connections and decided they'd like him as a 'CHIS' – the new word for an informant. The interest didn't last long: they backed off when it came to them loud and clear that if there was one thing you couldn't call Tommy Baines it was a snout. They'd have lost it completely if they'd found out that one of his closest friends was a support-unit sergeant.

She'd met him through the diving. Somehow he'd got the money together to take four of his clients on a basic PADI course where she was finishing her dive master's qualification. Forced together for two days, they'd hit it off. But it wasn't the diving that held them together, it was something less definable than that: a shared sense of being damaged, maybe – and, more important, a sense they were both meeting their debts by acting responsibly. For Flea the responsibility was about work and about Thom, for Tig it was work and his mum.

His mum was a bit dotty – nothing official, but Tig's prison sentence had been the last straw for her. When he'd got out of jail a year ago he'd moved straight in here as her carer and ever since had been dealing with the junk she amassed. Everyone knew it was slowly driving him mad.

'The idea was for me to come out and meet you,' he said now.

'I tried to call – and even if there was somewhere to go in this part of the world, I haven't got any money and, anyway, you said you wanted to talk.' Her nose was running. She wiped it impatiently. 'Look, Tig, for God's sake, I'm cold. I don't care about your mum if that's what's on your mind.'

He studied her for a while and she knew what he was seeing. She looked a mess. He pressed his face into the gap and examined her face, his right eye lagging behind the left. 'You're shaking,' he said. 'What's wrong with you?'

'I'm cold. Look, I came to talk to you. You asked me . Remember?'

He pointed down to her feet. 'You stay there. Right there. I'll be back when I've checked we're all decent.'

He disappeared into the dimly lit corridor with its peeling wallpaper and stained paintwork, leaving her on the doorstep. She waited, stepping from foot to foot, pulling her coat close. There was a cold, stale draught coming from the corridor and the sound of a badly tuned radio scanner from one of the rooms. That would be Tig's mum. Ever since Flea could remember his mother had been addicted to listening to the police. Always said she wanted to steal a march on them if they decided to come and get her, because that was how it was for her now,