Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  She turned to Bain, demanding. Bain couldn’t help but look at her.

  “What d’you think, cowboy? Fancy a piece of overweight, menopausal, alcoholic, depressive, double-mastectomied ass? I’m all yours. The men around here can’t get enough.”

  “Mrs. Abernethy,” said Pereira. “We need to find your husband. You haven’t spoken to him since yesterday morning?”

  Abernethy turned back, a deep breath, another drink from the glass, the glass laid carefully down on the table.

  “I have not,” she said, her words expressed slowly and clearly.

  “Would you usually have spoken to him at this stage of one of his trips?”

  “Sure,” she said. “He didn’t like having more than one night away from home. He liked to come back, and have his dinner on the table …”

  She started laughing, a sad kind of desperate laughter. No bitterness, no tears, just helplessness. Pereira and Bain waited it out, waited for the explanation that was coming.

  Another drink, a shake of the head, finally the elbow on the table, her forehead in the palm of her hand, while the other hand clutched the glass. “Oh, he never knows, does he? That’s what I think, but then, maybe he’s all over it. Maybe he knows exactly.”

  “Knows what?”

  “I never make anything, Inspector. I cannot cook for fucking biscuits. I have … Jesus, I have the phone numbers of every damn ready meal delivery service in the area. And I don’t mean number twenty-seven, Thai king prawn curry with black bean chicken coriander sauce. Home-made, expensive food, put it out on the table and it looks like I made it with my fair hand. What a damn fraud,” she added, lifting her head and staring at her fair hand as she said it.

  “There seems to be a lot of money around,” said Pereira. “Seems odd for a sales manager in a fairly small meat packaging company.”

  “Doesn’t it?” said Abernethy.

  She held Pereira’s gaze across the table, took another drink, laid down the glass, and then, poker-faced, covered in turn her eyes, ears and mouth with both hands.

  “You really have no idea?”

  “None,” she said. “I have no idea what he does, or where he gets his money. I just spend it.”

  She smiled, finally turned and looked at Bain for the first time since she’d flippantly, and bitterly, offered herself to him.

  “You up for it yet?”

  “D’you think something’s happened to him?” asked Bain.

  “Probably.”

  “Based on him not calling you, or is there something else?”

  She thought about that for a few moments, the glass lifted halfway to her face throughout. “Yeah. He always calls. It’s a guilt thing, I expect. Sure, I’ve shagged some minger somewhere, but here I am calling you, so that’s all right, love, isn’t it? That was more or less what was happening.”

  “And he didn’t call last night either,” said Pereira, not especially asking the question, as Abernethy had already made the point.

  “No, he did not, and yes, he usually would have done. So, I wondered if maybe the stupid bastard had died in a car accident. I mean, that’s what happens, isn’t it? People die in car accidents all the time. Every day. And the more time you spend in a car, the greater the chance you’ll die in one. That’s logical, isn’t it? But I presume if that’d happened, one of you lot would’ve been at my door by now. That’s what I thought when you rang the bell. Here we go, Dirk’s dead.”

  “You didn’t look like that was what you were thinking.”

  “No? Must be my drinker’s face. One step away from botox.”

  Pereira held her gaze for a while, and then looked around the room. Time for silence, and to let Abernethy do the talking. She was going to sense that Pereira didn’t believe her, and she wasn’t going to let the silence last. There would be some other obfuscation, or a nudge at moving the conversation on and the police back out the door. Bain, who knew the quality of his boss’s silence, did not speak either.

  Abernethy took another drink, this one almost finished now, then noisily placed the glass back on the table.

  “Are you going to look for him?” she asked.

  Pereira did not immediately end her scan of the room, slowly turning back after a few moments.

  “Yes, we are. Can you help us out at all? Anyone he might be with, anywhere he might be?”

  Abernethy smiled, shook her head, and got to her feet.

  “Here we go,” she muttered to herself, as her knee buckled slightly and she put her hand on the table.

  She got a pen and a Post-It note from the counter beside the microwave, and came back to the table. Another drink, pen in hand.

  “What details did you get from the office?”

  “None,” said Pereira, which wasn’t strictly true. Always best to contrast and compare, and to see what people were prepared to give up.

  “Here’s his mobile and his car registration. Maybe you’ll find him in a ditch. Your lot are used to leaving people lying in ditches, aren’t you? This is the hotel he stays at when he’s down there. And …” and she looked up, eyes moving from Pereira to Bain and back. “What else?”

  “Is there anyone else he’s likely to have called, anywhere else he’ll have gone?”

  “Not Dirk. Liked to stay in expensive hotels, and when he wasn’t doing that, he liked to come home, eat his dinner and sit down in front of the TV with a glass of Bunnahabhain.”

  “No friends?”

  “You obviously haven’t met him.”

  “No,” said Pereira. And I don’t think we’re going to either, she thought, and she abruptly pushed her chair back.

  “Mrs. Abernethy,” she said. “Thank you, we’ll be in touch. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  And she was already walking away as Bain was getting to his feet. Abernethy grimaced at him, he nodded, and then he was gone, a few paces behind the boss.

  *

  “What d’you think, Sergeant?” asked Pereira.

  Bain took a moment, as they drove away from the large house in the small estate of large houses, and considered the likelihood that Pereira had already worked something out and made up her mind, and was looking to see if he had spotted the same things.

  “There was no tremble of the hand, which one might expect from someone who seemingly drinks as much as she does. The stumble against the table was kind of clumsy, but then, it would have been anyway, so it’s hard to tell. I did get the whiff of drink, but it doesn’t mean there was vodka in that bottle. If she was drinking neat vodka, though, and wasn’t used to it, she did a nice job of not showing. The face, though, I didn’t get that. How do you fake a drinker’s face?”

  “She didn’t,” said Pereira. “She has rosacea. There was medication on the shelf above the kettle. Beside the Nurofen and the paracetomol.”

  “You read the label from six feet away?”

  “It was Dermalex.”

  She glanced at him. He looked vague.

  “Most common rosacea treatment.”

  “How d’you know this stuff?” he asked.

  Pereira didn’t answer. She looked at the clock. Robin and Anais would have eaten dinner already, and her mother knew she’d be late home. Back to the station for a quick wrap-up, hope that Cooper had already left for the evening, and then she could be home in time to put Robin to bed.

  “The Chief Inspector thought that just because Chantelle was featured on the cover of the video, it didn’t mean she actually featured in the video itself,” she said, moving the conversation on.

  “Really? Hmm,” said Bain.

  “You don’t watch porn videos?” asked Pereira, and as soon as the question had left her lips, she shook her head. “Sorry. Don’t answer that.”

  “That’s all right,” he said, smiling. “To be honest, I’m surprised anyone watches porn videos anymore. I mean, haven’t they heard of the Internet?”

  “Perhaps Packaged Meat Ltd. provide a nice straight to streaming service too.”

  �
�And you want me to check?”

  “We’re going to have to establish how involved Chantelle was with these people, and we need to try to find out who these people actually are. So, if this really is a limited company, we can find out the identity of the owners, and we need to look at those DVDs to see if Chantelle, or anyone else we know, is featured.”

  “Anyone else we know?” asked Bain. “Really?”

  “Sure. I mean, there were a few young women on the factory floor. We talked to them all.”

  “Good point.”

  “I’m going to dig around more deeply into Chantelle’s prodigious social media presence, and look at half the DVDs. You’re going to dig around into the company records, and take the other half.”

  “I hate it when my job makes me watch women having sex,” said Bain, drily.

  “You can skip the sex scenes once you’ve established the personnel involved,” said Pereira, and Bain smiled.

  They came to the junction, Pereira indicated, waited and then pulled out. Slotting into traffic, she picked up speed, heading back towards the station.

  “We’ve got to track down Dirk,” she said after a while, as she began voicing the list she was adding to in her head, “and we need to think about where that body was butchered and packaged. That’s crucial. If it wasn’t done at MPP, it was done somewhere with a similar kind of facility. It’s unlikely to have been in someone’s kitchen. The vacuum packing, the butchering … it had a professional, factory feel to it.”

  “That’s a big house we just left,” said Bain. “Might well have an extensive basement. Or a converted sitting room right next to the kitchen.”

  Pereira nodded.

  “Yep, but let’s try to track down Dirk first before we get the warrant to search his house. Meanwhile, we need to establish if there’s anywhere else in the area where the work could’ve been done. We’ve got two areas of operations here. Around Cumbernauld, and down on the Ayrshire coast.”

  “Technically, Millport’s in Argyll and Bute.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant. Given that we know Moyes travelled regularly to Cumbernauld, and we know how the packaged meat got from the Central Belt down to the coast, I think we should start looking up here. This is where it was done, and if not at MPP, then somewhere in the vicinity.”

  “I’m on it,” said Bain.

  “You’ve got plenty to do,” she said. “I’ll speak to Somerville when we get back.”

  Stopped at traffic lights, Pereira looked at the clock. Just over an hour until Robin’s bedtime. She’d be late, but it wouldn’t matter. Her mother never put Robin to bed on time anyway.

  *

  The one benefit of having a thirteen-year-old daughter who walked around the house like the clichéd herd of elephants was that Pereira always heard her coming. There weren’t many circumstances where that was to her benefit, but sitting at home at eleven o’clock in the evening, zipping through a succession of porn movies, was one of them.

  She’d put Robin to bed, following a lengthy discussion on the human meat case, which had largely featured her trying to change the subject. She had finally managed to get him to settle down and allow her to read him Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. Restlessness had given way to sleepy attention after a few minutes, which had given in to sleep a short while after that.

  Her conversation with Anais had naturally been more involved, but she’d left it as vague as her daughter would let her get away with. What she’d wanted, of course, was the odd gruesome side note that hadn’t made the news, which she could take into school the following day. Pereira had obliged her with a few pieces of information that they’d already given to the press, but which she didn’t think had been picked up.

  Anais was probably asleep by now, earphones in, her phone lying on the bed, but Pereira hadn’t checked for a while. Usually the chances of getting into a discussion with her daughter at this time of night — or, indeed, any time of day — were slim, but with the human meat case, and the thought that her mum might have become cool for five minutes, there was always the possibility that Anais would be more engaged.

  And now Pereira sat on the floor in front of the TV, the DVD remote control in her hand, a glass of wine at her side, skipping quickly through porn scene after porn scene. She had already confirmed that, not only was Chantelle in Cum Shot Babe 7, as indicated by her photograph on the cover, she was the star of that film and at least two of the others.

  Having already spent an hour on the social media life of Chantelle Crone, Pereira was now recognising several of the other players in the porn movies from Crone’s Facebook and Tumblr posts. These were the men and women that Crone talked about seeing, and talked about sleeping with. It was just that she’d obviously changed the context.

  From their tags on social media, these other players were at least contactable. However, the police were going to need to find some firmer connection here than just Kevin Moyes owning a series of porn DVDs, and Chantelle appearing in them.

  “Directed by Kevin Moyes had been too much to ask for,” she said ruefully to herself, as she slowed the latest DVD at its climax to watch the brief credit sequence roll.

  The films all seemed to be shot on the same limited set. Two rooms. A bedroom, and a sitting room with a sofa. Even these rooms didn’t seem to be in an actual house. They were crudely assembled rooms in a studio somewhere. It maybe didn’t even have to be a studio. It could have been a warehouse, anywhere with space to set up, a room or two to convert. In the sitting room, the walls even looked like bare concrete.

  The film came to an end, the ancient DVD player whirred briefly, the screen went dark, there was a low hum. Pereira reached forward, pressed eject, placed the DVD back in its box, and took out the next one in the small pile. LA Lesbian Gangbang.

  From the look of the picture on the front, which had obviously been taken in the same location as all the other movies had been shot, the only way these particular lesbians had ever gone to LA was if someone had travelled there with a copy of the DVD in their suitcase.

  She looked at the picture of two women embracing on the sofa, naked, their breasts pressed against each other. She took a drink of wine. Her second glass, nearly finished. Already knew that there would likely be a third glass to be had before she was finished here. She closed her eyes, put the cool glass against her head for a moment. The image of the two women was still in her head.

  Another drink of wine, then she put the DVD in the player and picked up the remote control.

  CHAPTER 10

  When she woke in the morning, there was a text on her phone from Bain, sent at 01.11 that morning:

  Bingo! Directors of Packaged Meat Ltd are Moyes and Mr and Mrs Abernethy. Actual owner unclear.

  The first thing she thought was that Bain shouldn’t have been working at that time in the morning. She herself had been asleep for at least half an hour by then. That aside, however, they did at least have something to take to Cooper that he couldn’t just flippantly swat back.

  Two days in and they had a clear path ahead. It wasn’t like everything was falling into place already, but at least they’d found a positive direction.

  Breakfast eaten at a rush, children dropped at school, she walked into the station at 08.27. She paused just inside the door of the open plan and looked around. More or less everyone in already, including Bain and Cooper. She went straight to the coffee machine, caught Bain’s eye, asked the silent question to which Bain held up the cup on his desk, put the cardboard cup in place and set the machine to large cappuccino, and spent the last few seconds before she got into the working day letting go of the stress of getting two children out of bed, away from the television and into school.

  “Hey,” she said, as she got to her desk. “What were you doing working at one in the morning?”

  “Bit between my teeth,” said Bain, then he added, “and to be honest, I looked at the porn movies first, felt a bit guilty about that, so spent a couple of hours on the company.”


  “Don’t work that late again,” said Pereira.

  “Yes, boss. How about you?”

  “Well, I know a lot more about Chantelle’s abilities than I really wanted to,” she said, sitting down.

  Bain smiled.

  “Tell me about it. But did you see that set? Holy shit. It just looked so cold. And I don’t mean, you know …”

  “The atmosphere was cold rather than the temperature, I know.”

  “I mean, it was weird. Looked like it’d been filmed in an old abandoned factory or something. Just bizarre. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been more turned off watching people having sex in my entire life.”

  He let out a whistle, his face quizzical at the thought that anyone could enjoy watching something like that. Pereira opened up her e-mail inbox.

  “Why wouldn’t you just film it in someone’s house?”

  “Maybe no one was willing to volunteer,” said Pereira, without looking away from her screen. Statement From The Chair of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) On Cuts To Budget To Be Announced At 12.00 p.m. On Wednesday 22nd. Delete. “Maybe it’d be obvious what they were doing. They wanted an out-of-the-way place where they wouldn’t be discovered, and no one would be asking questions.”

  “Yep,” said Bain. “Are we going to bring in Chantelle?”

  Pereira nodded, without yet looking up.

  “Check through this lot, cup of coffee, quick word with the boss, then we’ll go. We won’t call to tell her we’re coming.”

  “Sure,” said Bain. “What about you, you find anything?”

  “There were a lot of familiar faces from Chantelle’s Tumblr page in those videos, plus one other girl from the factory floor. We can get her in later. No mention of Moyes or Abernethy, no others that I recognised from involvement at MPP. I didn’t get through them all though, still a couple more to go.”

  “Ah, OK,” said Bain. “I got to the end of mine. Didn’t recognise anyone.”