remains we found in your rendering plant—’
‘Protein processing. We don’t call it “rendering” any more, on account of—’
‘I don’t care! You’re shut down till I tell you different!’ And with that she stomped off. It would have been an impressive exit, if she hadn’t stopped halfway down the stairs to haul her SOC oversuit out from the crack of her backside.
The man in the white outfit watched her go. ‘But we’ve got a backlog …’
Logan patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m afraid she’s right: we can’t risk any more human meat getting into the food chain.’ He looked up at the company name, written along the side of the abattoir building in three-foot-high lettering. ‘It’s an unusual way to spell Alba.’
‘The MD’s idea: he got fed up having to explain how to pronounce it all the time.’
‘Look on the bright side, it …’ Logan stopped and frowned. ‘Do you supply wholesalers? Butchers, cash and carrys, things like that?’
‘Couple of supermarket chains too. We’re very proud of our traditional—’
He was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. ‘I’m going to need a list of your customers.’
DI Steel was slumped in one of the boardroom chairs, hands over her face, listening as Logan told her the bad news. Again. He waited for her to go off on one, rant and swear, try to pin the blame on someone else. But instead she let her head fall back, stared at the ceiling, and said, ‘Oh … sodding hell.’
The boardroom was lined with posters of steaks, roasts, things on skewers, mince, chops, and those charts telling you which cut comes from which part of which animal. Like a preschool puzzle in meat.
She scrubbed her hands across her face, sighed, then asked Logan if he was sure.
‘Positive. The abattoir supplies Thompson’s Cash and Carry, and McFarlane’s butcher shop.’
‘Oh, we are so screwed!’
Midnight. Logan stopped on the damp concrete walkway and yawned, caught in the glare of a security spotlight. Drizzle made his SOC suit shine. The bone mill had been cleared out, the abattoir’s butchery and packaging areas searched and sealed off, and all the senior officers had buggered off to their beds. Bastards.
Logan stretched, groaned, and yawned again. Three disembodied sheep heads lay on the ground beside an empty skip, their creamy wool tinged with dark red. He knew how they felt.
The shed where they aged the beef and lamb stood off to one side – a large refrigerated building full of vacuum-packed meat and shivering police officers. They’d been at it for four hours, and still didn’t know if they’d found anything or not.
‘Like pulling teeth.’ The Police Search Advisor in charge of the shed team cupped his latex-gloved hands and blew into them. ‘I mean, look at it …’ he indicated the rows of shelving, the green trays full of meat – dark purple in the fluorescent lighting – the black plastic latticework of the big storage bins. ‘There’s tons of the bloody stuff in here and it all looks the same to me.’
It was Thompson’s Cash and Carry all over again, only on a much larger scale.
The POLSA turned and nodded at Doc Fraser. The old pathologist was huddled in a vast tartan blanket, examining shiny packages of dark meat. ‘Poor sod’s pushing sixty: should be sat on his backside drinking cocoa and fantasising about Doris Day in a bath full of jam, not buggering about in a bloody big fridge.’
‘You better tell everyone to take a break in …’ Logan checked his watch. ‘What, twenty minutes? Don’t want them keeling over with hypothermia.’
‘Any chance of a cuppa, or something?’
‘They’re opening the abattoir canteen for us – do everyone a hot meal, something with chips. It’s—’
‘Ah, no offence, like, but they sell human meat here. I’m no’ eating anything.’
Logan had to admit that he had a point.
The second search team were working their way through the skin shed – four constables in grimy SOC suits – smeared with dirty-pink salt and gobbets of fat – peeling the cattle skins from their piles one at a time, making sure nothing looked as if it belonged on a human body.
Logan got an update from the officer in charge, commiserated with him about the stink, then got out of there as quickly as possible. But the skin shed was Santa’s Grotto compared to the protein processing plant.
It was a dark, low-ceilinged room, just off the bone mill, oppressively hot and humid. Logan gagged: the smell of greasy, rendering fat was nearly overpowering. For some bizarre reason a small, wooden garden shed sat against one wall, the windows fogged over with condensation and a film of tallow.
Filthy pipes snaked through the air, leading in and out of three large black ovens that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a horror movie. Team three were working their way through a trio of centrifuges, picking tiny chunks out of a hessian-wrapped disc the size of a tractor wheel.
He’d been there less than thirty seconds, but Logan was already starting to sweat. ‘How you getting on?’
The female officer pulled off her facemask, pushed a limp strand of hair from her shiny face, and said, ‘Bloody dreadful, sir. Ovens’ve been off since about seven and it’s still baking in here. And this,’ she held up a handful of little lumps, ‘could be anything! Look at it! Bones, hooves, heads, blood, fat, it all gets passed through two sodding big sets of metal teeth till it’s no bigger than the tip of your thumb. Then it gets stuffed in those boilers and cooked to death. It’s just rubble!’
She tossed her handful of animal-gravel into a big metal sieve.‘And we’re dying of thirst.’
Logan looked at the centrifuges and their unidentifiable grey loads. ‘How much more you got to do?’
‘Heaps.’
‘OK, go get a cup of tea and—’
‘Holy shit!’ It was one of the male officers, he had something clamped between his thumb and forefinger, twisting whatever it was, so it glittered in the gloom. Everyone hurried round, peering at the tiny lump in his hand. He dropped it into Logan’s open, latex-gloved palm. It was a gold tooth.
Ten minutes later someone found another one – the crown for a rear molar. And that seemed to get their eye in. In twenty minutes they turned up half a dozen little lumps of grey-black metal: fillings, some still attached to their teeth.
Whoever the Flesher really was, he’d discovered a nearly perfect way to dispose of a body. After the bone mill, the ovens and the centrifuges, whatever solids were left went into another hopper to be ground into powder and sold to pet food manufacturers. God knew how many victims’ remains had gone through people’s dogs and cats, but Logan got the nasty feeling Thomas Stephen was just the tip of the iceberg.
Warm. Heather rolled over onto her side, smiling in the darkness. She bunched the duvet round her body, enjoying the feeling of fresh pyjamas on her clean skin. The soft swell of the pillow beneath her head.
‘It’s not that surprising, when you think about it,’ said Mr New. He’d calmed down a lot – death seemed to agree with him.
Duncan sighed.‘She’s trying to sleep.’
‘Stockholm syndrome they call it. She’s been here for so long, dependent on the Flesher for everything: food, water, survival. She identifies with him. Not to mention the physical and mental strain she’s been under.’
‘She’s not mental!’
Mr New laughed.‘Duncan: we’re dead, remember? We’re figments of her imagination and we’re arguing about whether or not she’s off her rocker. I think it’s pretty much a moot