Cut to the Bone

by Roz Watkins

  ‘I’m surprised you want to tie yourself down. You know what you’re like.’

  I looked up. What a strange thing to say. ‘I like it here. And it’s near to Mum.’

  ‘I suppose it is. If she stays here and doesn’t do anything ridiculous.’

  ‘Besides, I like my job.’ Craig’s bulbous face slid into my mind. ‘Mainly, anyway.’

  How much did he even know about my job? He’d never taken much interest. I’d hoped he’d be proud when I became a DI but there’d been no evidence of it. And then there was the shameful matter of having time off with stress when I was still in Manchester. Not the kind of thing a member of the Dalton family should indulge in.

  ‘What have you got planned today?’ I asked.

  He examined his fingers. ‘Do you think your mother would see me? I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Oh, Dad, I don’t know. She was pretty upset that you didn’t call back when Gran was dying.’

  He didn’t bother to repeat that he hadn’t got the messages.

  ‘Shall we talk about it later?’ I said.

  ‘But we can’t let her do this crazy trip.’

  ‘I think she has to do what she wants. It’s nothing to do with us any more.’

  ‘Come on, Meg. She’s in her late sixties. It’s ridiculous.’

  I didn’t want to admit I’d had similar thoughts. My friends were worrying about their parents not getting out enough, and mine was planning a trip to El Salvador. But Dad had no right to intervene.

  ‘It’s dangerous, you know.’ Dad shook his head. ‘She never used to be like this.’

  ‘She was too busy looking after us, wasn’t she, Dad? We should let her live her own life now. Do things she cares about.’

  He sighed and looked strangely forlorn. ‘I’m worried she’s going to get into trouble. But okay, I won’t contact her. I could do a spot of gardening for you?’

  I looked out of the window. The unkillable shrubs that I’d planted the previous year were thriving, but the rest of the place was more wildlife safe-zone than garden. I shrugged. ‘All right. If you fancy it. There are tools in the shed.’

  ‘I worry about your mother,’ he said again, prompting me to wonder if he still loved her, deep down. ‘What if she never comes back?’

  My phone buzzed. I fished it out. A message from Jai: Have you seen Justice for Violet FB page?

  23

  I left Dad moping at the kitchen table and walked out of the house into another day that belonged on a Greek island, with me in a tummy-control swimsuit by the pool, sipping a mojito. My Wi-Fi had been playing up and I’d not been able to see Facebook via the terrible Belper mobile phone signal, so I was keen to get into work and see what Jai had meant about the Justice for Violet page.

  I clicked open the car and shoved my bag in. A noise behind me. I looked round. Was it Hamlet? It sounded like a baby crying. I pushed the car door shut and stood very still. Definitely a baby, not Hamlet, and it sounded as if it was coming from the patch of scrubland by the railway.

  I locked the car and walked towards the noise. A baby crying from within a house was common enough, but I didn’t expect one to be bawling from the direction of the railway, especially this early. I followed a route which was clearly popular with incontinent dogs. The crying was getting louder.

  And then I saw it. My breathing quickened. A Moses basket.

  I ran towards it.

  Someone grabbed me. I spun round. A man had hold of my wrist. A man in a black balaclava.

  ‘Get the fuck off me!’ I shouted.

  Another man grabbed my other wrist. I kicked at his knees, but he didn’t let go.

  There were four of them in total. All in black, and wearing balaclavas and leather gloves. One of them had a knife. ‘Don’t scream,’ he said. ‘If you keep quiet, we won’t hurt you.’

  What an idiot I was. Falling for the crying baby. Not exactly original. The crying had stopped.

  They had both my hands and now there was a knife near to my face. The light caught it and I saw it was smeared with blood. I tried to calm my breathing. I couldn’t reach my phone or radio. Should I scream? They were nervous, jittery, probably not used to doing this kind of thing. The sort that might panic and actually stab me. I couldn’t risk screaming.

  A pulse throbbed in my ear. ‘What do you want?’ I tried to keep my voice steady.

  The one with the knife shifted round so he could see my face. I couldn’t see his, because of the balaclava. He was the most confident, the most intimidating. ‘We want to show you we’re serious,’ he said. ‘So you know what’ll happen if you let the Animal Vigilantes get away with what they did.’

  I wrenched my hand, trying to scratch the gorilla that had hold of it so we’d have DNA, but he gripped tighter and the only bits I could reach were covered in leather gloves. The ringleader shifted the knife nearer to my neck.

  ‘This isn’t helping us find Violet,’ I said. ‘She may be alive and now we’re wasting resources on people like you.’ I wanted to say more, and with more colour, but the knife was too close. Whose blood was on it?

  The fourth man walked over to the Moses basket and fished something out of it. A phone. He tapped the screen. Twisted it so I could see.

  A video was playing.

  I could hear the men breathing. A car door slammed in the distance. I wondered again if I should scream. But I daren’t take the risk of panicking them when I had a bloodstained knife hovering around my jugular.

  The mobile phone was close to my face. I watched the video.

  It showed a field at night, lit brightly by the moon. A pig – one of those short, fat ones whose bellies drag on the ground – was dozing outside in the warm night. A man was sneaking up behind it. The pig had heard him – I could see from the twitch of its ear – but it was trusting, and it didn’t move. The man lunged forward and grabbed it by a hind leg. It kicked out but he held fast. He was in the same black clothing and balaclava as these people. There was flash of metal from his knife – long and sharp, glinting in the pale light. I felt sick.

  A squeal.

  I couldn’t watch. It was the trust the pig had displayed that really did for me.

  The blood on the knife at my throat made sense.

  My breath came faster. ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘Yeah. And we’ll do more.’

  I wished so hard for a super-power. If I could spontaneously combust them, or send an electric current through my fingertips, or squirt acid from my eyeballs, how wonderful that would be.

  Instead I tried to keep my fury hidden and said, ‘All you’re doing is taking resources away from finding Violet. Is that what you want? There’ll be more than pig’s blood on your hands if we don’t find her.’

  ‘Finding Violet, finding Violet, why do you keep saying that? You know she’s dead. They killed her and fed her to pigs.’ I wondered if knife-man was on drugs. His energy felt unstable. Unpredictable.

  ‘If she is dead,’ I said, as calmly as I could, ‘this will divert resources from finding her killer.’

  He pushed the knife closer. It touched the skin of my neck. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’ll punish those fucking Animal Vigilantes. Because everyone knows it was them that killed Violet.’

  I shrank away from him but my hands were held firm by his two cronies. I could see his eyes through the holes in the balaclava. Grey and bloodshot. ‘It won’t bother the Animal Vigilantes,’ I said. ‘They know what you’re doing is irrelevant. They already spend their lives thinking about the millions of pigs who get their throats slit every single day. What you’re doing is punishing ordinary people who don’t think like that. And the owner of that poor pig.’

  A noise in the distance. I flicked my eyes towards it. A woman had appeared at the end of the path which led from my road. She froze for a second, then started running towards us. ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘Let her go!’

  Knife-man looked at me and then at the woman, who was getting closer, undete
rred by the balaclavas and the knife.

  I realised she was familiar. I’d only seen photographs, but this looked very much like Jai’s girlfriend, Suki.

  Knife-man spoke. ‘Let this bitch go.’

  They dropped my hands and shot off down the railway track.

  ‘Suki?’ I said weakly.

  She ran the last few steps and grasped my arm, supporting me as my knees weakened. ‘DI Dalton? Are you okay? Oh my goodness, what were they doing?’

  My heart rate slowed. ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine. Thank you for intervening. That was very brave.’

  ‘How could I not? What awful men. Are you hurt? Shall I take you somewhere?’

  ‘No, thank you, I should get to work.’ I gently removed my arm and took a step in the direction of my house. She came with me.

  My mind was swirling with images of balaclavas and knives, but through some bizarre quirk in my personality I was almost more stressed about what Suki was up to. She didn’t have a dog. Why would she be walking near my house?

  ‘Lucky I was here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, thank goodness. Thank you so much.’ I almost didn’t want to ask why she’d been around. I had a horrible feeling it had been to see me and have an awkward Jai-related conversation. ‘I should get going. We’ll need a statement from you, but we can deal with that later.’

  We reached my road and I eyed my car. While I was very grateful to Suki, I wanted to be in it and on my way to work.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You must be in shock. You should have a drink and a sit-down before you drive. Or I could drive you to the station. It’s no bother.’

  ‘No. Honestly. I’m fine.’ I leaned against the hot metal of my car.

  ‘Actually, I did want a quick word,’ Suki said.

  ‘It’s not the best—’

  ‘I know how close you are to Jai.’

  ‘We’re not especially close. We just work together.’ I absolutely did not need this.

  ‘He thinks I don’t like his kids.’

  A sinking in my gut. ‘Listen, Suki, I know nothing about kids. I mean, Jai’s kids probably are pretty annoying. I don’t blame you if you don’t like them that much.’

  ‘Would you tell him? Tell him he’s got it wrong? I do like them.’

  I wanted to be alone. In my car. Driving to the station. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I will. I’ll tell him you like his kids.’

  I’d been through multiple layers of bureaucracy in relation to my incident with Justice for Violet, repeating my story so many times it now felt bigger in my mind, more important, more scary than it had at the time. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t a huge deal. That they’d never meant to hurt me. But the emotional part of my brain – the ancient lizard part – wasn’t convinced. And now to top it all, DCI Richard Atkins wanted to see me.

  I found him at his desk, looking like he’d dressed in clothes fished out of his suitcase. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not feeling my best. Couldn’t sleep on the plane. Bloke on my left snored like a buffalo. You can sit—’ He waved towards his guest chair. ‘Oh.’

  Someone had put a sign on it. Condemned.

  ‘What on earth’s going on?’ Richard said. ‘What’s wrong with the chair?’

  Did he really not know? The chair was notorious. Only the youngest and fittest in the force could get out of it unaided.

  ‘It’s like a chair version of Charybdis,’ I said. ‘Sucking the unwary to their deaths. I’m fine standing anyway.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine. Absolutely fine. They didn’t hurt me. It was all very silly. Unfortunately I didn’t see any faces, but we might have got a hit on CCTV, you never know.’

  Richard sighed. ‘It’s to do with the missing person case, is it? I hear she’s an “internet sensation”. Not that I’d ever heard of the girl.’ Richard was like one of those famously out-of-date High Court judges who used to ask who the Beatles were or if ‘Gazza’ was an opera.

  ‘It’s certainly high profile,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Well, from what I’ve heard, it sounds as though you have it under control.’

  I wasn’t about to argue, but that was hardly an optimum summary of the situation.

  Richard rearranged the pencils on his desk into the shape of an ‘H’. Was he sending subconscious messages? Was it a cry for help?

  ‘How was your holiday?’ I asked.

  It was a mystery who he’d gone with, and one that Jai was determined to get to the bottom of. Richard had been so cagey that we suspected romance was in the air. ‘It was good,’ he said.

  ‘Where was it you went again?’

  He took one of the tiny cactus plants which adorned his desk and examined it. ‘South Africa.’

  ‘Wow. Amazing. On a safari?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you go alone?’

  He popped the cactus down and looked straight at me. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Anyone we know?’ I was pushing my luck, baiting Richard because it took my mind off that video. Stopped me thinking about the gentle manner of the pig before it died, and the silver knife at my throat, still wet with the pig’s blood.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone watered these while I’ve been away?’ Richard said.

  ‘Er … Aren’t they supposed to live in the desert?’

  ‘Meg …’

  ‘Yes?’ He made me nervous when he adopted that tone. ‘Craig’s wife’s been in touch with some concerns.’

  My insides sank. Not more from the WAGs. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She was worried he’d been attacked. Did you notice the injury?’

  ‘I did notice he had a small cut above his eye. I don’t know where he got it from.’

  ‘She’s under the impression he’d sustained the injury at work.’

  I frowned. ‘I’m almost certain he didn’t.’

  ‘Maybe you could have a word with him?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the best idea.’ Richard clearly didn’t know Craig very well if he thought I could go all pastoral on him. The last thing I needed was a pissed-off Craig on the rampage.

  I stood in front of the team, still struggling to get the image of that knife out of my mind. Violet’s sparkly smile beamed down at us. The air in the room felt too heavy, as if it had been replaced by an alternative atmosphere from a planet not quite right for human habitation. And someone had forgotten to wash. This was not the week to experiment with eco deodorant and cycling to work, or with one of our new special-issue ‘wicking technology’ tops.

  ‘There’s no sign of Violet Armstrong,’ I said. ‘We’re now extremely concerned about her.’

  ‘But are you okay?’ Jai said.

  I gave him a robust smile. ‘I’m fine. I’ve passed on as much info as I could about the men. But they were all in balaclavas and were wearing leather gloves.’ How calm and tough I must have sounded. How unaffected by it all. But inside I was shaking. Nothing felt solid. If someone touched me lightly, I’d fall down. To admit this, to walk away from the briefing and let someone else take over for a few moments, seemed impossible to me.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure you’re all right,’ Jai said. ‘It sounded nasty.’

  The feeling subsided. I was okay. ‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

  Jai shrugged. I wondered if he could see through the shell to shaky-me. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s not looking so great for Violet. We’ve had confirmation it was her blood and hair in the pigs’ trough.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Last night Fiona and I saw what twenty young pigs can do to a fifty-kilo sheep, so they could have, in theory, eaten a girl’s body.’

  Shocked murmuring went round the room in a wave and drowned out me saying, ‘I said “in theory”! But, okay, we’re now looking at the serious possibility that Violet was killed that night at the abattoir, and her body was fed to the pigs and/or put in with the missing abattoir waste.’

  Craig expanded his cheeks and then let the air out with a puff. ‘Wow.’


  Sick soul that I am, the talk of death was making me feel better. ‘We’re obviously looking for her blood on the abattoir equipment and in other areas,’ I said. ‘For the pigs to leave so little mess, whoever did it would have had to … chop her up.’

  ‘Ouch,’ Jai said. Helpfully.

  ‘We’ve got back the paternity results for Daniel Twigg,’ Fiona said. ‘He’s not Violet’s father.’

  I felt a small jolt of relief. I wasn’t sure why, given that we wanted to know who Violet’s father was.

  ‘Since Gary Finchley refused to take the test,’ Fiona said, ‘I think our working assumption should be that it’s him.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Jai said. ‘I wonder if he knows. Maybe not – otherwise he wouldn’t have made it so obvious that he fancied her.’

  ‘We are talking about the wilds of Derbyshire here,’ I said. ‘But I’m inclined to agree. Let’s have another good look at Gary. I don’t believe his alibi.’

  ‘The Animal Vigilantes are the no-brainer suspects,’ Craig said. ‘We need to push them harder. What about that Leona woman?’

  ‘She has a strong alibi,’ I said. ‘She was spotted on CCTV and her friend confirms she was with him. It’s not watertight, but it’s solid and we’ve got nothing to suggest she was at the abattoir.’

  ‘The Justice for Violet people are going ballistic that we’ve not arrested anyone from the Animal Vigilantes,’ Jai said. ‘And Frazzles the pig definitely had her throat cut last night, live on camera, and it’s all over social media.’

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. As I’d pointed out to my balaclava-wearing assailants, millions of pigs had their throats cut every single day, and most people didn’t give it a moment’s thought. But the nation was up in arms about Frazzles. Frazzles was kept as a pet by a family who owned a bit of land. Frazzles was a friend, not a meal.

  ‘Her owners named her after a bacon-based snack product?’ Richard said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jai said. ‘But apparently they loved her very much. She had a huge personality and was great with kids. It looks like there’ll be others tonight. We’ve got enraged Violet supporters saying they’ll keep attacking random animals until whoever killed Violet confesses.’