at my photo. I’ll be dead, but I’ll always be part of something. That’s important, isn’t it? Not to disappear into nothing …’
‘Pierdolona kurwa fuck.’ Andrzej Jaskólski jabbed at the start button again. ‘Work jebany piece of shit!’ He kicked the metal wall, but the mill still wouldn’t start. Typical: the boilers go down for two days and now the pierdolone bone mill was broken too. ‘Go to UK,’ said his wife, ‘earn lots of money, come back and set up own clinic in Warsaw. Be rich man.’ Kurwa mać. Degree in Orthopaedic Therapy and he ends up working in stinking rendering plant in stinking abattoir in stinking arse end of nowhere Scottish backwater.
Another kick. ‘Start, dirty bitch fuck!’
One more kick and the machine rumbled into life, the huge steel teeth at the bottom of the trough grinding through bones and off-cuts and fat.
Only no chopped up bones fell into the next hopper.
Ja pierdole!
He grabbed the long wooden pole that leant against the wall – still not laughing at the kurwo foreman’s joke – and jabbed at the mass of bones.
Poke, jab, poke. A sudden clunk, and the pile slumped. Grinding noise. Bone and gristle fragments chugged into the next hopper, ready to be torn up into even smaller pieces.
Andrzej Jaskólski turned to put the pole back where he’d got it. Tonight he’d go into town with other Polish workers from abattoir. Drink. Maybe dance. Maybe find nice woman with own flat and not go back to jebanego bed and breakfast with no hot water and stains on ceiling and bed made of concrete.
He froze, one hand on the pole, then turned back to the sinking mass of cattle bones. Sweat breaking out on his forehead. Hoping his eyes were playing tricks on him…
They weren’t.
‘O kurwa jebana mać…’
Logan had never seen an abattoir before. He’d been expecting a wooden building with blood-smeared concrete and wailing cattle, but from the outside, Alaba Farm Fresh Meats looked more like a warehouse. A big, breezeblock building with a green metal roof and a two-storey block of offices, all hidden behind a thick, twelve-foot-high leylandii hedge. From the street you’d have no idea what was going on inside – if it wasn’t for the smell.
The company sign tried to make everything look jolly and approachable: ‘FARM TO PLATE, SCOTCH MEAT IS GREAT!’ and a happy cartoon pig, wearing a butcher’s outfit and holding a cleaver.
Logan marched past the thing, across the car park, and up to the security bunker. An articulated lorry was stopped at the barricade, its headlights glowing in the thin, cold drizzle, sheep staring out from the four-storey trailer as the driver argued with one of the guards.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do with all these bloody sheep?’
‘It’s no’ ma fault, is it? Police say naebiddy gets in or oot till they’ve finished.’
Logan hurried inside. Security monitors dominated one wall, showing white oversuited figures picking their way through the abattoir and its outbuildings. Three uniformed PCs sat going through the old tapes, wreathed in the comforting steam of hot coffee. Logan helped himself to a mug, then stood with his backside against the radiator, watching them work.
‘Anything?’
One of the PCs shrugged. ‘Not yet.’
When his bum had defrosted, Logan topped up his coffee, poured one for Steel, and headed out into the abattoir grounds.
Everything was going on round the back, the harsh white glare of the IB’s spotlights cutting through the cold November night.
He struggled into yet another SOC oversuit and followed a line of blue-and-white Police tape into a three-storey, enclosed metal structure. The smell was much worse here: raw meat and roasting animal fat, like a lamb chop left under the grill for too long. The air felt … greasy with a sour edge to it that made his stomach churn.
Steel was at the top of the stairs, hands jammed deep into her pockets, her face creased in disgust. ‘What took you so long?’
‘You’re welcome.’ He handed over the extra mug of coffee.
‘This got sugar in it?’
‘What do you think?’ Logan stepped round the inspector, peering over the guard rail at a mass of bones, hooves and offal. There were two IB technicians in there, passing chunks out to a third who carried them over to a collapsible table, where Isobel scrutinized them.
‘Bloody stinks in here …’ Steel wrapped her hands around her mug. ‘Come on then, door-to-doors?’
Logan pointed towards the back wall of the bone mill. ‘All the houses on that side are derelict – apparently no one wants buy a three-bedroom semi downwind of an abattoir.’
‘There’s a surprise.’
‘Uniform are going through the rest. Nothing so far.’
‘Yeah, well, the pretty and talented DCS Bain is interviewing the workforce as we speak. So that’ll be a bloody disaster.’ The inspector sipped her coffee, and grimaced. ‘This taste funny to you?’
‘It was fine in the security bunker …’ but Steel was right, out here it had developed an unpleasant flavour of rancid lard.
‘Right,’ she leant on the guard rail, watching as Isobel chucked a long bone into a wheelbarrow and waved for the next sample, ‘half six – the abattoir’s running double shifts to catch up, ’cos they’ve had an equipment failure – and some poor sod’s clearing out the bone cruncher. Turns out he’s an orthopaedic thingy back in Poland, so when he sees a human thighbone poking out of the pile he hits the emergency stop and refuses to budge till they call the police.’ She shook her head. ‘Weird, eh? Guy goes to medical school and ends up over here, ’cos he can make more money working in an abattoir shovelling bones than he can doctoring back home.’
‘You question him?’
Steel turned. ‘No, I took his word for it when he said he’d no’ hacked anyone up. Looked like an honest bloke …’ she slapped Logan on the arm. ‘Course I bloody questioned him.’
Isobel straightened up from her table and passed a triangle of bone to her assistant. ‘Scapula.’ It went into a blue plastic evidence box.
Steel pointed at the growing pile of human remains. ‘It’s Tom Stephen, they found his head … you want to see?’
‘Excuse me?’ A man in white Wellington boots, baggy plastic trousers, overcoat, hairnet and hard hat had appeared on the walkway behind them. ‘Do you think this is going to be finished tonight? Only we’ve got a backlog—’
‘How’d you get up here?’
He pointed over his shoulder. ‘Access door from the Den of Dung – where we rinse out the intestines and stomachs …’ He dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘Look, can’t you just empty this lot out and take it with you?’
‘Excuse me a moment, sir,’ Steel leant on the guardrail and shouted down at someone on the ground. ‘I told you to seal the bloody entrances! That means all the entrances, no’ just the ones you can be arsed with!’
She turned back to the gentleman. ‘Sorry about that. Now if you don’t mind: this’ll go a lot faster if you let us get on with our jobs.’
‘But—’
‘This is the way it works. We have to go through each and every chunk of crap in that hopper. Then we’re going to examine every bit of meat in the place. And until we’ve done that, you’re no’ hacking up anything