Unti Peter Robinson #22

by Peter Robinson

  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 gray hair. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down. I apologize 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 molded 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 gray 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, Annie 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 anymore. “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?”

  Annie said nothing.

  Doug Wilson looked up from his notes. “I wouldn’t use innuendos like that with the boss,” he said. “She’s been known to get quite nasty.”

  Dalby looked at Annie and swallowed. “Aye . . . well . . . We don’t use those much anymore.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Annie. “You stopped using them because they can cause brain matter to enter the bloodstream, and these days ­people are all so worried about mad cow disease.”

  “My, my. You have done your homework. Anyway, we now rely mostly on the nonpenetrating kind, which stuns the animal. It works without puncturing the skull.”

  “The one that killed our man put a hole in his head,” said Annie.

  “Well, it would, wouldn’t it? It was a penetrating bolt gun. In some cases, even a nonpenetrating gun can put a hole in a human’s skull, if it’s positioned correctly.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Back to the stolen pistol.”

  “Yes, well, as I said, we reported it stolen at the time. Nothing happened.”

  “I’m sure the officers followed up.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they did, but it would be a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, wouldn’t it, if you didn’t even know where to start.”

  “Could it just have been lost? Mislaid?”

  “We might be a bit sloppy on occasion, but we’re more careful than that. It was stolen.”

  “Did you have any suspects?”

  “No. Well, not technically, at any rate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody saw anyone take it, and nobody knew anyone who had expressed an intent to take it. We don’t even know exactly how long it had been missing before the loss was discovered.”

  “You don’t check them often?”

  “Once in a while. Stocktaking.”

  “So it could have been missing for some time?”

  “Not more than a ­couple of weeks. After your boss called, I checked the files and discovered we had let two ­people go around that time, either of whom could have stolen the pistol. I’m not saying they did. That’s what I meant by ‘not technically.’ For all I know, the person who did it could still be working here. But she said she was interested in disgruntled employees, perhaps with a grudge, and these two fit the bill.”

  “Thanks for doing that,” said Annie. She meant it, and she could tell that Dalby knew she did. It seemed to embarrass him.

  “Well, we take this sort of thing seriously,” he said.

  “She’s not my boss, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “The detective who called. She’s not my boss.”

  Dalby glanced at Doug Wilson. “No, I should have gathered that much from him. You’re the boss. My mistake.”

  “No problem. So why did you fire these two ­people?” Annie asked, feeling a bit silly. Was it really important enough to make a point of her rank with Dalby?

  “Why do you usually fire someone?”

  “There could be any number of reasons. In your business, I don’t know.”

  “My business is the same as any other. You fire ­people for incompetence, for stealing, for persistent absenteeism, for failing to follow correct procedures, for insubordination.”

  “OK. So what did these two do wrong?”

  “They weren’t connected at all. It was two separate incidents, a ­couple of weeks apart. The first one was a skinner, and I suppose you could say he was just too sensitive. He shouldn’t have been doing the job. This kind of work isn’t for the fainthearted.”

  “Then how did he get it in the first place? I mean, don’t you have psychological tests to weed out psychos who get their jollies from killing. So you can employ them, that is.”

  Doug Wilson gave Annie a horrified and chastising glance.

  “Sorry,” she said, holding her hands up.

  Dalby paused and spoke slowly. “All employers make mistakes sometimes,” he said. “Even the police, I should imagine. It’s why we all have probationary periods.”

  “This worker didn’t make it past his probation?”

  “No. The official problem was absenteeism and drunke
nness on the job.”

  “I imagine that would help in—­”

  “Yes, the drink helped him. He couldn’t handle the job so he took to drink to dull his mind. But do you have the slightest idea how dangerous it is to be intoxicated around some of the equipment we have in here? And not only for the one who’s drunk.”

  “I can imagine,” said Annie.

  Dalby grunted. “Aye. It worked, to an extent. Sometimes he’d be so badly hungover he didn’t come to work for two days.”

  “So you fired him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t there any counseling or anything available?”

  Dalby gave her a scathing look.

  “Can you give us his name and address?” she asked.

  “Ulf Bengtsson. He was a Swede.” Dalby read the name and address off a sheet of paper on his desk, and Doug Wilson wrote them down. “I don’t know if he’s still there—­in fact, I very much doubt it,” Dalby added. “But it’s the last address we have for him.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s become of him?” Annie asked.

  “All I can say is I doubt he’s working in the industry anymore. Maybe he’s gone home to Sweden.”

  “Do you know of any other abattoirs that would have employed him after that?”

  “No. We certainly didn’t give him a reference, and he hadn’t yet earned his slaughterman’s license.”

  “What about an unregulated abattoir?”

  “I’m not saying they don’t exist. They tend to be small operations, with just one production line, and I can’t see one taking in a drunk like Ulf. I mean, it was pretty much constant intoxication by the end. I can only hope he got professional help, or he’s probably dead by now.”

  “Can you tell us where any of these illegal abattoirs are?”

  “I don’t know of any around here. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I don’t know them. As you probably know, this industry is very strictly regulated, and since the various controversies, from mad cow to horse meat and rotten meat in your frozen burgers, it would be even harder to get away with anything. No doubt ­people do it. No doubt they succeed. But to be off the radar you’d have to stay out of the way and keep a very low profile. They’re small operations, as I said. They supply some restaurants and hotels, unscrupulous butchers, the occasional old folks’ home.”

  “And the other man? What was his problem?”

  “Kieran Welles, with an ‘e,’ like Orson. He was a different kettle of fish entirely.”

  “Tell us about him.”

  “Kieran was with us for some time. Eighteen months, in all. He was a good worker, not troubled by nerves or drink. He was a slaughterman, and he was versatile. Mostly he did knocking work. It was his job to use the bolt gun on the animals when they came through from the lairage. But you could put him just about anywhere on the line and he’d get the job done. A good slaughterman is hard to find.”

  “And what was his problem?”

  “He was a bit too keen, you might say.”

  “Too keen?”

  “Cruel.”

  “What?”

  “He was cruel to the animals. He kept it well hidden, but it came out often enough, and in the end we couldn’t tolerate his working here anymore. I can tell by your expression that you think we’re all a bunch of callous bastards in this business, but we have our lines, and Welles crossed one.”

  “What do you mean ‘cruel’? What did he do that was worse than his job? I mean, it was his job to fire a bloody bolt pistol at their heads, right, penetrating or non. How more cruel could he be?”

  Dalby leaned forward on his desk. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I saw him stub a cigarette out in a pig’s eye once, just for the fun of it. He’d kick and punch the animals sometimes. Again, for fun. Sometimes he’d deliberately fail to stun them correctly, so they were still alive and conscious when they were hung up on the line.”

  Annie felt her stomach churn. It was becoming difficult to hold the bile down. She noticed Doug looking into the gray distance out of the window, over Dalby’s shoulder. Maybe he was reconsidering tonight’s steak dinner. “And it took eighteen months to find this out? You weren’t aware of it before?”

  “I’m not here to answer to your censure. You can save your righ­teous indignation for your tree-­hugging sisters in the pub. They do it when you’re not looking, and you can’t be looking every minute of every shift. But word gets around. Once somebody saw him. We found it hard to believe—­Welles was a big lad, but he had a sort of farm-­boy innocence about him—­but we kept a closer eye on him, and that was that. He got warnings, but they didn’t do any good.”

  “Was he intelligent?”

  “He wasn’t stupid.”

  “And do you know where Mr. Welles is today?”

  “I neither know nor care,” said Dalby, “just so long as he never shows his face back here again.”

  “Have you never considered the effect that doing this sort of work can have on ­people? Alcoholism, cruelty. You’re creating these monsters yourself. Don’t you think it desensitizes ­people, creates the kind of person you say you had to fire?”

  “I’m not a psychologist, miss. I’m a simple abattoir worker. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that does happen in some cases. As I said, this kind of work isn’t for everyone. If they’re not damaged to start with, maybe it damages them. All I can say, though, is that most of the workers are decent human beings doing an honest day’s work, and the bad apples are few and far between. In that, it’s no different than any other line of work.”

  “But why do ­people do it?”

  “Somebody has to. You have to eat. It’s a job, a decent wage.”

  “Is there no other way?”

  “If there were,” said Dalby, “believe me, we’d be using it. But as long as ­people want to buy their nice cuts of meat all nicely wrapped in cling wrap at the supermarkets, or laid out in neat juicy rows in the butcher’s window, this’ll go on.” He pointed his finger at her as he talked. “You can think what you like about us, but we do try to be humane, and we don’t countenance behavior like Welles’s. The other guy, the Swede, maybe you can feel sorry for him. He couldn’t cope, and it messed him up. I suppose it’s our version of shell shock or battle fatigue, whatever the shrinks call it now.”

  “PTSD. Post–traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Whatever. Like I said, it’s not for everyone.” Dalby stood up slowly. “Now, I’ve got work to do. Have you got what you came for?”

  Annie swallowed and looked at Doug, who put away his notebook. “I think so,” she said. “There may be a few more questions later, if any of this leads anywhere.”

  “I’ll be here. Just ask for me.”

  As they walked down the stairs, Annie knew that she should go and examine the metal cabinet the guns were kept in, but she couldn’t face it. She didn’t think it would be fair to send Doug, either. If it came to it, she realized, they could send someone over to examine it, but it was two years since the gun had been stolen, and they weren’t likely to find anything of interest there now. She felt guilty for shirking her duty, even though she could easily rationalize her actions, but she held her breath, and her tears, all the way to the car, and only when she was inside with the engine running, reversing out of the abattoir yard, did she let out the stale air and breathe in again. But she kept the tears to herself.

  IT WAS a pleasant winter afternoon in London, with temperatures just into double figures, so Banks decided to walk from Kings Cross to Havers’s office. It was a long time since he had visited the area behind and to the west of Kings Cross–St. Pancras, and he knew little about it. It was hard to categorize, he thought as he walked and looked around him, but as Joanna had pointed out, it was a bit dodgy. There were offices, houses, flats, garages and so on, but it lacked any coherent identity, at least any that
was obvious to the casual visitor.

  At one point he passed what was clearly a drug house. A tall, burly man with a shaved head blocked the reinforced metal door, hands clasped firmly over his bollocks, and beside him a hunched weaselly young fellow had his mobile glued to his ear. Banks was certain the Met must know about them, and they were probably under surveillance at that very moment. There seemed to be so much watching and so little catching and convicting these days. Montague Havers was obviously another case in point. Whatever it was he did, nobody stopped him; the police just watched. There was always the chance of a bigger Mr. Big around the next corner. And so it went on. What did you have to do these days to convince the CPS you had enough evidence for an arrest?

  Banks’s mobile rang just after he had passed the drug house. He saw the burly man cast a baleful glance in his direction as he answered. Did he look so obviously like a copper? He had never thought so.

  “Banks here.”

  “Sir, it’s me. DC Masterson.”

  “Ah, Gerry. What can I do for you?”

  “Can you talk, sir? I mean, listen. I think I can do something for you.”

  “I’m on my way to have a chat with Montague Havers.”

  “Then I’m just in time.”

  Banks turned a corner and leaned against a brick wall. “Go on.”