Abattoir Blues: The 22nd DCI Banks Mystery (Inspector Banks 22)

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’ Terry asked.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Winsome said. ‘I don’t live far.’

  ‘But it’s cold. You’re cold.’

  Winsome laughed. ‘I’m used to that. Thanks,’ she said. ‘It really was a lovely evening.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  They stopped as they entered the top of the square. ‘Well, I’m parked over there, behind the shopping centre,’ Terry said.

  Winsome pointed the other way. ‘I’m up York Road a bit.’

  ‘Well, if you won’t let me drive you home, then . . .’

  Winsome felt rather saw than him moving towards her, his lips aiming for hers. She felt a surge of panic, of claustrophobia almost, and found herself turning aside, so that his lips grazed against her cheek, then she heard herself saying a curt ‘Goodnight’ and hurried off towards home, heart palpitating.

  She pulled her jacket collar around her throat to keep out the icy needles of wind and hurried along, head down, past the lit-up shop signs and window displays until she got to her street, on the fringe of the student area. There she turned left, walked up the slight rise for fifty yards and turned into the imposing detached house, with its gables, bay windows and large chimneys, where she had the top-floor flat.

  Once she was inside, she leaned back on the closed door and took stock. What on earth was she thinking of? It was only a goodnight kiss. Was that something to be so frightened of? But she had been. She remembered the tension that ran through her body when she saw him moving towards her, the tightness in her chest.

  She made herself a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchenette and thought about what a pleasant evening it had been, how easily their conversation had flowed. When she curled up in her favourite armchair, with only the shaded lamp lighting the room, she realised that she had very little experience of talking to anyone outside her job. Most of the time she talked to other cops, criminals, forensic scientists or lawyers. She had been a shy child and had never found it easy to socialise, and that had carried over into her adult life. Was this what her life had come to? But wasn’t she too young to start wondering what had happened to all the promise, the dreams, the young woman who had walked down the jetway at Gatwick, excited as a little child at the life ahead of her in the new country she was about to discover? Marvelling at the cars, the huge buildings, the fast motorways and even the unrelenting rain and a sky the colour of dirty dishwater.

  No, she decided in the end. She hadn’t lost all that. She was still young and she had most of her life ahead of her. She was scared, she realised; that was all. Like so many people. Scared of commitment, scared of dipping a toe in the water. Scared of being hurt. It was a long time since she had had a serious boyfriend, someone there was a possibility of sharing her life with. Tonight had shown her that there could be other possibilities. That Terry liked her was obvious, and she knew she liked him. How could she get over her fear? How could she stop behaving like a silly little girl, probably making him think she was nothing but a tease? She was starting to feel really stupid about her behaviour.

  Winsome sipped her tea, brow furrowed, and swore to herself that the next time she saw Terry Gilchrist, she would kiss him. On the lips. That thought made her smile.

  Chapter 12

  Banks enjoyed train journeys once he had got through the station experience, found somewhere to put his luggage and laid claim to an empty seat. Fridays were busy days on the East Coast line, but he got a mid-morning train that wasn’t too full, and the seat next to his remained empty all the way to King’s Cross. He had decided to board at Darlington, though York would have been closer, because from Darlington the train would pass the airfield and hangar after Northallerton, and he wanted to have a look at the area from a train window. Doug Wilson had got the message through to the railways, and they had even put out a few flyers on selected trains, but so far nobody had come forward to report seeing anything out of the window on the Sunday morning in question. Banks was curious as to why.

  The sky looked like iron, and he got the feeling that if a giant banged the rolling landscape with a hammer it would clang and reverberate. It was partly the stillness that caused the effect, especially after last night’s wind, and the sudden dryness after the constant rains. Still, it felt like the calm before the storm. And the daffodils ought to be out by now.

  It didn’t take long to get to Northallerton and whizz through the small station without even slowing down. The only stop on this journey was York. Keeping his eyes fixed on the left, where the lighter grey of the Cleveland Hills broke the charcoal horizon in the distance, he finally saw the hangar coming up. There was a stretch of about a quarter of a mile of neglected pasture between the airfield and train lines, but he could see the huge hangar clearly. The problem was that all the action had occurred on the other side of the building, where the gate in the chain-link fence was. Banks could see a couple of patrol cars and a CSI van parked by the outside fence – Stefan’s team was still working there – but it was all gone in a flash. Even if someone had been looking in that direction, he realised, they couldn’t have seen anything going on inside the hangar, and any cars parked right at the front would be obscured by the building itself. The only possibility would have been someone noticing a lorry or a car heading down the road in front of the gate, parallel to the train tracks, but the timing had clearly been wrong for such an observation.

  Satisfied that they had probed that possibility to the end of its usefulness, Banks returned to his relaxation. There was no hot water on the train, which meant no tea or coffee and only cold sandwiches to eat. He decided he could manage the journey on an empty stomach. He still had half his Costa latte left when he boarded, so he made that last for a few miles. He had brought his noise-cancelling headphones, which meant he could listen to any kind of music he wanted, and not just the sort of loud rock that drowned out the train noise. He started off with the Bartók and Walton viola concertos. Other musicians made fun of the viola in orchestras, but he loved its sound, somewhere between the plaintive keen of the violin and the resonant melancholy of the cello, with a sweet elegiac strain all of its own. He had known a professional violist once, a very beautiful young woman called Pamela Jeffreys, but he had let her slip away from him.

  The train rattled along and Banks was more aware of feeling the physical rocking than the sound. He was reading Hangover Square, but he looked up every now and then at the landscape. As they passed through flat green stretches of the English heartland, the flood damage was plain to see, whole fields under water, streams and rivers overflowing their banks, and that terrible iron-grey stillness about it all. He even saw a tractor marooned in the middle of a deep, broad puddle, and thought of John Beddoes, whose stolen tractor seemed to have started all this. Was Beddoes connected somehow? An insurance scam, as Annie had suggested, or in another more sinister way, through some vendetta with the Lanes, perhaps? Other than for insurance, though, why would a man have his own tractor stolen?

  The train flashed through Peterborough, with its truncated cathedral tower, the river and its waterfront flats looking a bit shabbier now than they had when Banks worked a case down there a few years ago. Banks had few friends left from his Peterborough childhood days. Graham Marshall had dis-appeared when they were all schoolboys, and many years later, when his body was found, Banks had helped with the investigation into what happened to him. They had been the famous five all those years ago: Banks, Graham, Steve Hill, Paul Major and Dave Greenfell. Steve Hill, the boy who had introduced the young Banks to Dylan, the Who, Pink Floyd and the rest, had been the next to go, from lung cancer a few years ago. And just last year Paul Major had died of an Aids-related illness. That left two out of five. No wonder Banks felt his circle of friendships diminishing.

  He put down Hangover Square and switched the music to his playlist of Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel songs, starting with the beautiful ‘If You Go Away.’ Banks liked Brel in the original; he couldn’t understand all t
he words, but even he, with his limited French, knew that there was a big difference between ‘If You Go Away’ and ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’. Where the English version was sad, the original was a desperate plea.

  The playlist lasted him all the way to London.

  Annie knew she’d been putting off the abattoir trawl, and after visiting four of the places she knew why. She had intended her objection to the assignment at the meeting partly as a joke, but she was fast coming to realise that there was nothing funny about it at all. She was getting heartily sick of abattoirs. Almost to the point of being physically sick on more than one occasion so far. The affront to her vegetarian sensibilities was almost more than she could take.

  Fortunately, the previous day she had headed off to the east coast with Banks and so postponed the task, but on Friday morning she had no excuse. All she could to ameli-orate things was to drag poor Doug Wilson along with her. She thought he’d provide a little comfort and amusement, but so far he had provided neither. If anything, he had been more disgusted than she was at the things they had seen, heard and smelled. If she hadn’t been a vegetarian already, occasional lapses into fish and chicken aside, she decided, she would be one by now. Doug wasn’t one, himself, but Annie was starting to think that by the end of the day he might well be. If she were in the business of conversion, she knew now he was at his most vulnerable and it wouldn’t take much effort.

  For the most part, they had managed to avoid the working areas and have their conversations in offices that didn’t smell of the rank horrors being committed on the killing floor. But you couldn’t escape the stench entirely, or the screaming or bleating of the terrified animals. Nobody could convince Annie that they didn’t know exactly what was coming. No matter how much you modernised an abattoir and tarted it up, it was still barbaric, in her opinion. You could paint the inside yellow and pin children’s drawings to the wall and it wouldn’t change a thing.

  They were about to call it a day and head back to the station a bit early when Gerry Masterson rang Annie’s mobile.

  ‘Where are you?’ Gerry asked. ‘Where are you right now?’

  ‘Wensleydale,’ said Annie. ‘We’re just packing in for the day. Why?’

  There was a pause at the end of the line. For a moment, Annie thought she’d lost the connection. It happened often out here. ‘Gerry?’ she said. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Have you visited Stirwall’s yet?’

  ‘No. We’re saving them for tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re not so far away.’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘I’m sorry to do this, guv, really I am, but I think you should go there now.’

  ‘Gerry, what’s going on? It’s been a crap day, to put it mildly.’

  ‘I know, I know. And I’m sorry. But I’ve been checking reports and speaking on the phone all day, and Stirwall’s reported a penetrating bolt pistol stolen about two years ago. We need more details.’

  Annie swore under her breath. ‘Can’t you get them over the phone?’

  ‘It needs an official visit. There’s always something else comes up you’d never think of on the phone. Employee records, for example. Someone might have some names for us. Besides, you’re a senior officer on the case.’

  Annie knew she was right. ‘OK, we’ll go now.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Forget it. Got a name for us?’

  ‘Ask for James Dalby. He’s the head supervisor, and he’s there waiting for you.’

  As Annie turned the car round, Doug Wilson gave a heavy sigh.

  ‘What’s up, Dougal?’ she asked. ‘Hot date tonight?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Wilson. ‘Actually, it’s my sister’s eighteenth birthday do. We’ve booked a table at that new steak restaurant in town.’

  Annie looked at her watch. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll make it in plenty of time.’

  ‘Aye. Smelling like an abattoir, no doubt.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be eating steak for dinner, won’t you?’ said Annie with a sweet smile. ‘If what we’ve seen so far today hasn’t put you off, then why not watch a few more cows getting slaughtered first? Who knows, maybe you’ll even see your dinner before it’s dead.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Wilson, then he scowled and looked out of the window at the dark grey moors.

  Soon the long squat shape of Stirwall’s loomed before them. There had been complaints that it had been built too close to the village nearby, and residents complained of the smell and noise at all hours of the day and night. But it was still there, still operating. Stirwall’s was one of the larger abattoirs in the area, too, with vans coming and going at all hours, stacks of boxes on pallets in the yard.

  They parked in the area marked visitors and asked the first worker they saw where they could find James Dalby. He pointed to the front doors and told them to turn left up the stairs and they’d find Mr Dalby’s office on the first floor.

  They thanked him and walked towards the open entrance. The outside of the building was surrounded with lairages, as one of the workers at the previous slaughterhouse had called them, holding-pens where the animals languished awaiting slaughter. At the moment, some of them were full of lowing cattle and others were being sluiced out according to health regulations before another batch was led in.

  The smell got worse inside. And the noise. As each animal came individually through a chute from the lairage, its was rendered unconscious by a knockerman’s bolt gun, then strung up by its hind legs on a line. Three monorails of dead animals slowly moved down the length of the abattoir. At each stage of the way, slaughtermen performed their specialised tasks, such as slitting the throat for bleeding, spraying with boiling water to loosen the skin, then the actual skinning and disembowelling and careful removal of valuable organs, such as the liver, kidneys, pancreas and heart. The stench was awful. Annie tried to keep her eyes averted as she climbed the metal stairs to Dalby’s office, but it was impossible. There was something about ugly violent death that demanded one’s attention, so she looked, she watched, she saw. And heard: the discharge of the bolt guns, the buzz of the mechanical saws, and the change in pitch when they hit bone as the head was cut off and the animal split in half. It was almost unthinkable that someone had done this to Morgan Spencer.

  Annie knocked on Dalby’s office door, and they were admitted just as a screeching noise far worse than fingernails on a blackboard rose up from the killing floor. Annie didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t want to know. She was glad to close the door behind her and find that the room was reasonably well soundproofed and that the air smelled fresh. No doubt Dalby’s exalted position had its perks. Annie had been worried that he would have been patrolling the floor in a white hat and coat keeping an eye on the workers, and that they would have had to walk by his side to interview him, keeping pace with the line, as they’d had to do at the previous place they visited. But he was the one who supervised the supervisors.

  Dalby was a roly-poly sort of fellow in a rough Swaledale jumper, with a ruddy complexion and a shock of grey hair. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I apologise the place is such a mess, but I don’t get a lot of visitors.’

  Annie had wondered about that when she had parked in the visitors area. It certainly wasn’t very large, she had noticed. There were two orange plastic moulded chairs, and Annie and Doug sat on them. Dalby went behind his desk. Through the window, over his shoulder, Annie could see the moors rolling off into the grey distance. It was a calming view.

  ‘I’ve just been speaking with a DC Masterson,’ said Dalby. ‘Nice lady. Terrible business, this, though. One wonders where to begin.’

  ‘How large is this operation?’ Annie asked first, when Doug had taken out his notebook.

  ‘Stirwall’s is a large abattoir,’ Dalby replied, leaning back in his swivel chair and linking his hands behind his neck. ‘We employ about a hundred personnel, sometimes more when things are especially busy in autumn.’

  The lambs, Ann
ie thought. The Silence of the Lambs. ‘That’s a lot of people,’ she said.

  ‘We manage to keep busy. We’ve a good number of meat processors to supply. Not to mention butchers and supermarkets.’

  ‘As you’re aware,’ Annie went on, ‘we’re interested in an incident of theft that took place here around two years ago.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dalby, nodding gravely. ‘We did report the theft to the police at the time.’

  ‘What exactly were the circumstances?’

  ‘It was a penetrating bolt pistol. This model.’ He took a loose-leaf binder from his desk and flipped to a picture for her. It was exactly the same as the kind the forensics people said had killed Morgan Spencer.

  ‘Where was it kept?’

  ‘There’s a metal cabinet fixed to the wall down on the floor where we keep all our stun guns.’

  ‘Locked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Who has keys?’

  ‘Well, I do. The supervisors do. And the knockermen and slaughtermen, of course. I mean, to be honest, almost anyone down there can get to them if he wants.’

  ‘That sounds very secure.’

  Dalby gave her a suspicious look. She knew her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. Nor was it appreciated. ‘It worked,’ he said. ‘We’ve only had the one theft in sixty years.’

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Annie, ‘if it was used to kill someone. A human being, I mean.’

  Dalby narrowed his eyes and peered at her. He didn’t look so roly-poly any more. ‘You don’t approve of what we do, do you?’

  ‘Whether I approve or not is irrelevant.’

  ‘Right. Yes. I thought so. You’re one of them there vegan tree-huggers, aren’t you?’

  Annie flushed. ‘Mr Dalby. Can we please get back to the matter in hand? The bolt gun.’

  ‘Right, the bolt gun. Well, as I said, it’s the penetrating kind.’ He leered. ‘Know what that means?’