‘You telling me he used a dead pig to grow his bugs? That he killed a pig?’
‘Wouldn’t have to be a full-grown pig.’ Hendricks shrugged. ‘A piglet would do the trick. You can get a lot of bugs on a very small corpse.’
‘Shit!’ Thorne sat back hard. Hendricks looked at him. ‘There was a local farmer in the pub, banging on about having one of his piglets stolen.’
‘No need to thank me,’ Hendricks said. ‘I wouldn’t mind one of those beers you mentioned though.’
Thorne rose slowly from his chair, still processing the information.
‘And while you’re up, I don’t suppose you noticed any ketchup in those cupboards.’
FIFTY-ONE
‘You lot took your bloody time.’
‘Yes, well, I’m sure you understand. With everything that’s been going on.’
Bob Patterson looked like he didn’t understand at all. As though a missing piglet was every bit as important as a missing girl. The farmer leaned out through the small gap he’d left between door and frame to peer at the warrant card Thorne was holding up. ‘Well, at least they’ve sent a detective and not one of those useless articles in pointed hats.’
Thorne said, ‘Right,’ and turned to look again at the farmer’s collie, racing back and forth along the fence of the nearest field. The dog had not stopped barking from the moment Thorne and Hendricks had pulled up.
‘She’s fine with people she knows,’ Patterson said. He shouted at the dog to be quiet, but the animal carried on barking. Patterson stepped back and opened the door. ‘Come on then . . . ’
The farm was five or six miles south of Polesford, on high ground the other side of Dorbrook. Driving along the rutted track, having turned off a road that was only slightly kinder on his tyres, Thorne had seen that the farm was a small-scale operation. He had no idea how much of the visible land belonged to Patterson, but there was only a modest farmhouse, a barn and a couple of small outbuildings. To the left of the track, he had been able to see the metal pig shelters dotted across the pasture; rusted arches, moated with mud.
‘I like pigs,’ Hendricks had said, staring at the pens, the animals lying down or snuffling in front of them.
‘I could see that last night,’ Thorne said. ‘The way you polished off those sausages.’
‘They’re a damn sight cleaner than people think, did you know that? If you say that someone’s living like a pig, that’s actually an insult to the pig.’ He wound down the window, made grunting noises.
‘Doesn’t smell that clean,’ Thorne said.
‘Cleverer than dogs, as well.’
‘I’ve never seen a pig fetch a stick.’
‘Only because they can’t be bothered,’ Hendricks said. ‘Chimps, dolphins, elephants, then pigs, they reckon. The cleverest animals.’
‘Then way down the list there’s a couple of the blokes you’ve been out with.’
‘Yep.’ Hendricks put the window up. ‘Fit as fuck and thick as mince,’ he said. ‘That’s how I like ’em . . . ’
Now, Patterson showed Thorne and Hendricks into a kitchen that might have been spacious had not almost every inch of floor and work surface been taken up. There were piles of newspaper bundled up with twine, rows of bulging bin-bags, cardboard boxes stuffed with magazines and industrial-sized tin cans filled with nuts and bolts, old cutlery, elastic bands.
Thorne glanced at Hendricks, who raised his eyebrows. Both knew someone with hoarding tendencies when they saw them. Hendricks had once performed a PM on a middle-aged woman who had died at home after years spent hoarding. It had taken police several hours to locate her body.
Patterson pointed them towards a table that was as much a workbench as anything else. It was covered in bits of wire, valves and circuit boards; the wooden casings of several old radios piled up at one end.
‘My dad used to do this,’ Thorne said. ‘Take things apart and put them back together again.’
‘It’s relaxing,’ Patterson said. ‘Something to do.’
Only half of what Thorne had said was true. His father had developed this habit shortly after his Alzheimer’s had begun to take hold. He would disassemble radios and TV sets with great enthusiasm, but they had tended to stay that way.
‘You could have tea, but there’s no milk.’ Patterson was standing on one of the few visible patches of red and white chequered lino. It was heavily stained and torn, where it had not come away from the floor completely.
‘No problem,’ Thorne said.
Hendricks leaned close to him. ‘He probably can’t find the fridge.’
Patterson joined them at the table. He pushed a few of the radio parts to one side.
‘Let’s talk about your piglet,’ Thorne said.
Patterson nodded. Said, ‘You want a description?’
‘I think I know what a piglet looks like,’ Thorne said. He was aware of Hendricks looking away, giggles approaching fast.
‘You know what a Tamworth looks like?’ Patterson waited. ‘Thought not.’ He folded his arms. ‘This isn’t a big operation, not like those intensive places everywhere. Thousands of animals, sows in crates.’
‘I think we passed one on the way here,’ Thorne said. Row upon row of low pig-sheds, fifty feet long. Metal towers, a vast concrete slaughterhouse with a crane alongside.
Patterson huffed. ‘I farm my pigs in pasture, which is better for them, better for the meat. Heritage breeds. Tamworth and Berkshire.’
‘Right,’ Thorne said. He had taken a notebook out, but the page remained blank.
‘Only got a dozen sows to farrow, so I can’t afford to be losing piglets right, left and centre.’
‘So . . . this was a Tamworth piglet, was it?’
The farmer nodded. ‘Light brown. Lovely little thing. I’ll find you a picture, if you like.’
‘That would be helpful.’ Thorne could only presume it would be a generic picture and that Patterson did not take photographs of every single piglet. ‘When did it go missing?’
‘I can’t remember the exact date . . . six weeks ago, maybe.’
Thorne glanced at Hendricks. Three weeks before Jessica Toms had gone missing. ‘Taken overnight, was it?’
Patterson nodded. ‘There last time I changed the feed. Gone the next morning.’
‘You don’t have electric fences, anything like that?’ Hendricks asked.
‘Small place, like I said.’
‘Not just you though,’ Thorne said.
Patterson looked at him.
‘You don’t run this place on your own, I presume.’
‘A couple of local boys help out,’ Patterson said. ‘I manage.’
‘Could it have been one of them?’
‘Yeah, I did think about that, but they’re good lads.’
‘You sure? Your dog didn’t bark,’ Thorne said. ‘You’d have woken up if she had.’
‘Yeah, I thought about that an’ all.’
Thorne put his notebook away. The page contained nothing but an atrocious doodle of a pig. ‘In the pub, they were saying you’d been accusing all sorts.’
Patterson looked like he’d swallowed something very sour. ‘Yeah, well, balls to the lot of them.’
‘The landlord said you’d had a go at him. Told him you’d be keeping an eye on his menu or something.’
‘Said the same in all the pubs round here. Kept an eye on that Indian place too. Someone pinches some fish, you try the fish and chip shop first, don’t you? Stands to bloody reason, I would have thought.’
When Thorne and Hendricks stood up to leave, Patterson went digging in a few of the boxes until he found the photograph he was looking for. He handed it to Thorne. Half a dozen light brown piglets.
He pointed. ‘That’s the one that was stolen.’
Thorne looked at the picture out of politen
ess, then dropped one of his cards on to the table. He made the same speech he’d made a hundred times before. If you think of anything that might help, don’t hesitate, blah blah blah.
‘I don’t get it,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re obviously fond of them, so doesn’t that make it harder when it comes to having them slaughtered?’
The farmer looked at Hendricks as though he was an idiot. ‘They’re money, is all. I’m fond of money too. You take one of my animals, you might just as well be mugging me in the street and taking my wallet.’
Driving back down the track, the dog still barking, Hendricks said, ‘I’m sure I’m right, about the piglet.’ He looked at the photograph of the pigs that Thorne had placed on the dashboard. ‘But something still doesn’t make sense.’
Thorne slowed, rattled across an animal grid.
‘Why did he go to all the trouble?’
‘To implicate Bates,’ Thorne said.
‘Yeah, but however old the body had looked, there’s no reason Bates couldn’t have done it. Everyone would presume Bates was responsible, so why make it look older than it was?’
Thorne had asked himself this question already. The answer was hardly comforting.
‘You’d have a point, if he was only planning on doing it once.’
Hendricks understood. ‘This was like a dry run.’
‘Now, everyone believes Bates is the killer, which is exactly what the real killer wants. But he can’t get away with killing a second time, not with Bates in custody. Not unless the body fits in with that timescale.’
Thorne stopped at the end of the track, checked traffic, then pulled out fast on to the road. The photograph of Patterson’s pigs slid along the dashboard.
‘You reckon he’s got more bugs lined up then?’
Thorne nodded. ‘And I think Poppy Johnston’s still alive.’
FIFTY-TWO
She’s stopped screaming, because now she knows there’s little point and because she has no voice left. Her throat is raw and it hurts to swallow, to slurp at the inch or two of water on the floor all around her. By the end, the sound of her screams bouncing off the walls in the dark had been making her head thump, but for a while at least she thought it might have been worth it. She knows that if the rats can get in, then somewhere there must be a way out. A missing brick, a hole in the floor somewhere. She had thought that perhaps her voice might carry through the ratlines and up and out into the open air, but now she imagines her cries buried somewhere above her in the soft earth or lost in a tangle of tree roots. Perhaps if someone walking around up there were to dig down, one of her screams would come bubbling up and whoosh out like gas or something. Like those hot springs or whatever they are that she’s seen on TV documentaries, places in Iceland and America she used to talk about going to one day.
She thinks about the one exotic place she’s visited; a school trip to France the year before.
She thinks about the boy she had been going to meet that night, who was a bit of an idiot, if she was being honest. And another boy, two years above her, who seemed nice. She’d heard from various other girls that he liked her and she’d seen him looking.
She thinks about the girl at her school who had a kid at fourteen. She’d thought the girl was a silly slag, same as everyone else, that she’d chucked her life away, but now she’s eaten up with envy and there’s a pain where she’s never felt one before.
Mental, some of the things she thinks about . . .
Could I eat a rat?
I hope the police are using a nice photo.
Will my wrist get skinny enough to slip out of this shackle before I die of starvation?
And her mum and dad in bits, because they were bad enough when the dog died. And her horrible, lovely brother, and his boat. And the smell in the kitchen when she came home, and music and getting into bed and laughing and watching rubbish on the telly and her mates and all of it, and how stupid she is, and how sorry.
How stupid.
Have a drink now, if you like . . .
More than anything, she wishes that she had drunk a lot more of whatever he had put in that bottle. She imagines discovering that for some reason he has left loads of the stuff down here with her, gallons of cheap, warm vodka spiked with enough drugs to knock out an elephant.
So she could down it all, bottle after bottle, until she became part of the blackness.
So she could choose.
PART THREE
Still, Like
You’re Dead
FIFTY-THREE
From the edge of the bed, Charli watched her brother looking at himself in the mirror. He gently touched a finger to the almost perfect half-moon, purple beneath his right eye, traced it slowly down to the swollen bottom lip, dabbed at it. There was a hint of a smile as he squared his shoulders.
‘I still don’t know why you went,’ Charli said.
Danny continued to study himself. ‘Told you, I needed to get some books.’
‘I know what you said.’
‘So. Be quiet then.’
‘Since when do you give a shit about schoolwork?’
‘Nothing else to do, is there?’
Charli went back to work with tweezers, plucking at the small hairs on her shins. There was music coming from outside. Some idiot with a radio. The crowd was not as large as it had been, but looking out earlier she’d recognised faces and it was clear that some people were coming back day after day. She wondered if they were now on some kind of tourist map. See the historic abbey then come and gawp at the house where the monster’s family was staying. Some people had been sitting on folding chairs in hats and coats, drinking tea and eating sandwiches and when she’d been online she’d seen the selfies people had posted that they’d taken outside the house. Thumbs up, grinning like morons. There were stupid jokes and some people had made comments about the ‘Bates motel’, which she didn’t understand.
‘I think you were showing off,’ she said.
Danny turned round. ‘What you talking about?’
‘Going to the school.’
‘You’re mental.’
‘Like you’re enjoying being famous or something.’
‘Yeah, because I really wanted to get punched.’
Charli switched legs, carried on plucking. ‘You were smiling, before. Looking at yourself.’
Danny turned back to the mirror. ‘Just thinking about what I’m going to do to that dick when I’m back at school.’
‘I told you,’ Charli said. ‘We won’t be going back to school.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Wherever we go, I’ll be coming back to sort him out. I know exactly who he is and I know where he lives. See how hard he is without his mates around.’
Charli laughed. ‘You had two coppers with you.’
‘They were nowhere near me.’ Danny glared at her in the mirror. ‘He came up from behind when I wasn’t looking, didn’t he? Anyway, you weren’t even there, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Charli knew who the kid was, too. Whatever the reason for her brother going up to the school, the boy who had attacked him was now the one doing all the showing-off. She had seen the pictures he had posted on Instagram. Posing like a victorious boxer, mates holding his arms aloft. A comment left underneath:
not the first time danny bates has been given a good fisting!
Charli leaned across to put the tweezers down on the bedside table. She brushed the tiny hairs from the duvet. It was probably just one of the lame gay jokes kids like Danny made without thinking. But all the same she wondered if it might actually be what they thought; if they believed that because Steve had done what everyone said he’d done, then he must have been doing the same things at home.
To Danny and to her.
She knew that Danny had seen the picture too, had gone looking for it as soon as he was back in
the house. He hadn’t mentioned it.
For a few minutes they said nothing, listened to the voices from the bedroom next door. Charli flicked through a magazine and Danny sat at the foot of the bed, staring at the door.
‘She’s supposed to be an old friend of Mum’s, but she wasn’t even at the wedding, was she? When Mum married Steve, I mean.’
‘So?’
‘So, how come they’re spending all this time together, having these secret conversations like they’re BFFs?’
Charli glanced up from her magazine. ‘Ask Mum.’
Danny swept a hand back and forth across the grimy carpet, sending dust and tiny fragments of grit jumping. ‘Come on, do you trust her?’
‘Haven’t really thought about it.’
‘End of the day, she’s a fed like the rest of them.’
‘You didn’t hear what she said to that bitch Carson and the others.’ Charli laid the magazine down. ‘When her and Mum got back from the hospital and found out about what happened at the school. Gave them all a proper bollocking.’
Danny shrugged, unconvinced. ‘I think she knows something about Mum,’ he said. ‘From when they were at school.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Like she’s got something on her. Has to be some reason she’s here all the time. Spending the night. Why else would Mum be so matey with her all of a sudden?’
Charli said, ‘Maybe you’ve got it the wrong way round.’
Danny turned, brushing the dust from his hands.
‘Maybe Mum’s got something on her.’
Linda looked genuinely happy for the first time in days. She had been clutching the piece of paper as though it were a winning lottery ticket, since snatching it from the manila envelope a few hours before. She unfolded it again, nodded and smiled, then held it out so that Helen could see.
‘Come on, this proves it, surely.’
Helen pretended to look. She had been shown the piece of paper several times already and had known what it was straight away. The visiting order from Hewell prison had arrived at the Bates family home that morning and been delivered to the house shortly afterwards – along with a final reminder from an electricity company and several pieces of junk mail – by a police officer who had not looked entirely pleased at having to play postman.
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