Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  “You worked too late,” said Pereira again, covering her discomfiture.

  “We’ve got a killer to track down,” said Bain. “Living the dream.”

  She looked up, but he wasn’t smiling.

  “You said the owner of Packaged Meat Ltd. wasn’t clear?”

  “No,” he said. “You ever get into any dodgy business law, that kind of thing?”

  “Some fraud, as with our second hand car gangster, but not much intricate city stuff. Why?”

  “I did a little through in Edinburgh a few years back. That side of business is a total minefield. Shell companies, overseas registrations, all sorts of things. Sure, this is likely to be way less complicated than the deal that allowed Donald Trump to buy 17% of Russia or whatever, but it doesn’t take much. We might need to speak to someone in Legal. But the owner is listed as Blue Horizon Media, and they’re listed as a subsidiary of Entertainment Corps, and they’re part of a bigger group called …” and he searched around for his notepad, then said, “State Funds Inc.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And you know, it sounds big and corporate, and sounds like there’s going to be a head office in New York, but it could all be getting done by one guy sitting in front of a computer in a two-bedroomed shithole in Airdrie.”

  “’K. We’ll get Chantelle in first, chase down what we have, then pursue that end of it. In the meantime, let’s …”

  She broke off, PC Somerville having approached.

  “Boss,” he said.

  “Colin,” said Pereira, “you looked into other locations that could’ve done the meat packaging?”

  “Yes, boss,” he said, and he nodded at Bain this time too, before turning back. “I’ve found four potentials so far, two of which are currently active. A small, privately owned plant on the north side of Airdrie. Smaller even than MPP. And then there’s a plant just off the M9, near Falkirk. That’s pretty huge, supplies Tesco and Asda. Owned by an American firm, International Farm Products, who themselves appear to be owned by an Asian conglomerate based in Singapore.”

  “It’s not State Funds Inc., by any chance?” asked Bain hopefully.

  Somerville glanced at his notebook.

  “Trans-Continent Food Corps,” he said.

  “Nice try,” said Pereira drily. “Go on, Colin, there are two more?”

  “They were both closed down over ten years ago. One, well, might’ve been converted into a community centre, but it’s hard to tell. I expect there was planning permission granted and it was a news story, then it never happened. Looks like the last one is just lying derelict. It’s possible, judging from the photos, that some of the equipment was left behind. Really, it’s just an old abandoned factory.”

  Pereira held his gaze for a moment. Long enough, in fact, that he looked curiously at her and said, “Boss?”

  She looked over at Bain.

  “You’re thinking, old abandoned factory?” said Bain at her look.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Really, though? Making porn videos in one room, then next door carving up bodies? I know we come across some weird shit in this job, and I know the awfulness of humanity knows no boundaries, but …”

  “It fits, Sergeant, that’s all,” she said, “and anyway, we’re not talking about the two things happening at the same time. Here we have two men making porn movies, and someone then taking at least one of them out the game, which is going to have been a damned good way to bring the porn movie production to an end.”

  “Packaged meat,” said Bain, nodding.

  “Have I missed something?” asked Somerville.

  “There’s a porn movie element,” said Pereira.

  “And no one told me?” said Somerville.

  “Thanks, Colin,” said Pereira. “Can you e-mail over the addresses of the two disused plants, please?”

  “Boss,” he said, and he turned away.

  “Right,” said Pereira, getting up from the desk, “I’ll speak to Cooper, can you …”

  The sentence drifted away. Bain looked at her expectantly.

  “There was something,” said Pereira. “Yep, we never called the hotel that Abernethy was supposed to be staying at two nights ago, right?”

  “Slaley Hall,” said Bain. “I don’t think so. I’ll call.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and walked through to see Cooper.

  *

  The body hung upside down in the old, abandoned factory. One hook occupied, another spare on either side. The throat had been slit, and the blood had been drained, running across the pale, dead face, tumbling through the hair like a babbling brook across riverwort, collecting in buckets beneath.

  Blood for blood sausage. There was a meat product where no one would tell the difference.

  As the killer, the Cold Cuts Killer of forthcoming legend, arrived at the hole in the rear wall of the warehouse, a rat hurried across her path, not stopping to watch her approach. Humans never bothered the rats around here, and the rat paid her no attention.

  The miserable drizzle of early morning had begun to turn to sleet, and as she turned and looked back, she could see she’d left footfalls on the ground. She wondered for a moment whether she should have been covering her tracks, but apart from the complete impossibility of leaving no tracks in snow, the sleet was just beginning, and it was due to turn to heavier snow as the day progressed.

  Still, it might be an idea for her to take care of her tasks quickly, then when she left there would still be time for her tracks to be covered.

  Approaching the six-foot plate of corrugated iron that served as a covering for the hole in the wall, she took a quick look around to see if she was being watched. A final precaution, it was one of many. She hadn’t been followed, there was no one in the vicinity. There rarely was.

  There was one time when there’d been three boys hanging out at the other end of the building. One of them sitting against the wall, the other two playing football with a can.

  She had watched them from a hundred yards away. The boys kicking the can had stopped, and the three of them looked at her. She’d been too far away to tell if they were eyeing her with intent, or nervousness. Underage drinking, drugs, there was the possibility they’d be worried she was a plain-clothed police officer. On the other hand, they were quite likely to be the types who wouldn’t have cared whether she was a one-woman SWAT team, they would just have told her to fuck off anyway.

  She’d had three options, and entering the warehouse and getting on with her business wasn’t one of them. Turn and walk away. Engage them, get their measure, maybe have some fun, then leave. Or kill them.

  Option two, followed by option three, was not out of the question. Indeed, was perhaps inevitable. If anyone else had known they were here, when their disappearance was reported, the police might well come this way, the warehouse would be searched.

  And so she had turned quickly away, and within a few seconds had disappeared into the nearby woods. Later, from a distance behind trees, she watched them come looking for her.

  Ultimately she did not carry out the plan she formulated as she watched them tramp noisily through the woods — to follow them home, killing them one by one — although it was placed on the substitutes bench, to be brought onto the field of play should she ever see them near the warehouse again.

  In behind the corrugated door, a final glance over her shoulder as she entered, and then through the large, abandoned space, still occupied with old machines and broken down equipment. Across the concrete floor, the high windows above stained and cracked and covered in cobwebs, she made her way to the stairs in the far corner. Up to the next floor, which was divided into small rooms. She walked along the corridor, the way illuminated by the torch on her phone, to the third entrance on her left, past what had passed for the bedroom and the sitting room in Moyes’s ridiculous porn empire.

  As she was about to walk in, she found herself glancing back over her shoulder along the corridor. A moment, staring into the grim morn
ing light, a shiver coursed through her. She shook it off — she really hadn’t heard anything — and walked into the room.

  Dark, without the lights yet turned on, with another doorway minus a door on the other side of the room from which she’d entered.

  “Well, hello,” she said, smiling, as though trying to break the curse of the nervousness that had temporarily gripped her. “There you are!”

  She stood in front of Dirk Abernethy’s corpse, the upside-down head at the same level as her knees. In the harsh, bright glare of the torch, the corpse did not return the greeting.

  “We come to it at last,” she said, “the great butchering of our times.” Then she laughed at her own line, the peculiar noise the only sound in the entire edifice of the dark, cavernous, soulless factory.

  *

  Back in Dalmarnock, Bain and Pereira were setting off for Cumbernauld and the surrounding area. They would look at the factories first, and then they would go to speak to Chantelle Crone.

  The phone call to Slaley Hall had revealed that Dirk, a regular visitor to the hotel near Hexham, and well known to many of the staff, had not fulfilled his booking from two nights previously.

  By now, Pereira and Bain had little doubt. Yes, it was possible Dirk had killed Moyes and then run. But the murder and body disposal of Moyes had obviously entailed planning, and part of that aforethought, had Dirk been responsible, would likely have involved being able to continue with the routines of life on which he’d been so set. No, Dirk was not the running-away type, which more than likely meant that Dirk was dead.

  Cooper had said nothing when she’d told him what they were going to do, the lead they were following up. Literally nothing. He’d looked cold, contemptuous of it, but it wasn’t as though he could actually complain. How could he? It wasn’t even as though he’d thought of some other direction they should be taking. He had nothing, but he seemed to resent her making progress. He seemed to not want there to be progress.

  “I love the smell of processed ham in the morning,” said Bain, as they pulled out of the carpark.

  Pereira shook her head, smiling ruefully, and said, “Glasgow … shit, I’m still only in Glasgow,” and Bain laughed.

  *

  One slice. Two slice. Three slice. Four. The things that go through your head.

  She stopped for a moment. Dead still. Listened to the sounds of the morning. The lighting they’d used for the film production next door, not quite bright enough to make a quality motion picture, was ample for her butchering purposes.

  She had moved on to part two of her plan. Simpler really, and with less widespread distribution, yet when people noticed, it was going to cause far more upset.

  She had the old machinery, she had the copycat labels and packaging she needed, she had her disguise for the benefit of the television cameras, she had the stolen car, she had the plan. Spend a day going around supermarkets in the west of Scotland, swapping over Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda packaged meat products, for her own variety.

  Someone would notice soon enough. The alarm would be raised. All meat products would have to be withdrawn until a full check had been carried out, and when the police came looking for the CCTV footage, they would see an old woman in a bright red hat inserting the sliced human meat in amongst the beef, and they’d see her driving away in a stolen car. And they would never be able to find her.

  Was it far beyond the scope of her original plan? Sure, of course it was. That had been one of revenge. One of making sure those two human toilets, Moyes and Abernethy, got their just desserts. But things move on, plans take shape.

  She turned at the sound. Stopped what she was doing, listened to the silence. Her mouth was dry as she strained to hear the noise that had got her attention a few seconds earlier. The noise she’d thought she’d heard. Was it windy outside?

  She had the sense of it, though. The sense of someone outside, in the corridor. She swallowed, or at least tried to, and finally laid down the large butcher’s knife with which she had been slicing off large chunks of Abernethy’s flesh.

  The next noise cracked like a bullet from the corridor, even though it was the slightest of sounds.

  A footstep on a piece of broken glass.

  She braced herself, tense and hot, suddenly in a cold sweat.

  What was she scared of? She was the one who had killed Kevin Moyes. She was the one who had killed Dirk Abernethy. Why be afraid? She was the one who induced fear, who lurked in shadows, who pounced when least expected, who watched with glee the look of terror just before she brought down the knife, who felt the visceral excitement of watching the pulse of fresh blood.

  Yet her heart pounded like she’d never felt before.

  Just a cat, she thought. Why wouldn’t it be a cat? It was easy enough to get into the building. There were rats, and presumably mice, plenty of food for a cat.

  “Well, are you going to just stand here and wait, or are you going to show some balls and have a look?” she said quietly to herself.

  She lifted the ten-inch knife off the worktop, and then started walking, slowly, warily, towards the doorway. Behind her the half-butchered body of Dirk Abernethy lay on the table, pieces of the corpse already tossed into the large black bin. They would be kept, in rotting putrescence, until she decided it was time to move on to other game, and then she would fire up the incinerator housed at the far end of the warehouse and burn the bodies in two-thousand-degree heat, unconcerned if anyone came looking to find out why the warehouse was in use.

  She thought about it, the incinerator, as she moved towards the doorway. Distractions, distractions. Focus!

  She paused at the doorway, her ears searching for any hint of sound. A breath, a shuffle, another piece of disturbed glass. It wasn’t even dark. What would you be like in the middle of the night? she thought.

  “Jesus,” she said to herself quietly, her imagination plaguing her, but the breath she let out was nervous and a little more desperate than she would have thought likely.

  “You’re the one with the knife,” she muttered again, but that determination to walk confidently out into the corridor was being undermined by the basic survival impulse. Stay hidden. Stay behind the wall. Wait to see your enemy before they see you.

  She closed her eyes for a second. Steeled herself. Felt the fright, the tingle of nerves and fear all over her body.

  “Fuck,” she muttered, “come on.”

  She took a step forward. There was a noise behind her. She whirled.

  “Chantelle,” said Pereira. “Lovely to see you.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Late morning, the snow was falling in thick flakes. Early winter snow, likely all gone by the same time the following morning. Pereira and Bain walked up the Abernethy garden path, no sign of anyone else having walked through the snow in the previous hour or two.

  Chantelle Crone had been taken, in the first instance, to Cumbernauld Police Station. Pereira had come to inform Mrs. Abernethy of her newfound widowhood, something she thought the woman would find neither shocking nor distressful.

  In the car on the way over they had discussed the trauma of seeing the butchered body of Dirk Abernethy laid out on a slab. It had been extremely unpleasant of course, and somewhere, in some government department or other, they would be offered counselling. It was the kind of thing that your brain would insist on bringing back to you in the middle of the night, or at the most inappropriate time. But this was the police, this was their line of work, and this was their counselling. Chatting about it in the car, a conversation instigated by Pereira. Nowhere for the conversation to go, just a matter of getting the subject matter out into the open. Acknowledging the awfulness, each of them gauging the other’s reaction. Pereira also aware that she’d have to follow up, through the right channels, with the station in Cumbernauld, to check on the others who’d attended the scene.

  One effect of murder not much talked about: on the police officer’s psyche.

  Bain rang the bell, pulled his co
at close in to himself against the cold. They stood, side by side, on the lowest step, heads down.

  “I never understood it when people say that it’s too cold to snow,” said Bain. The first words either of them had spoken since they’d discussed Abernethy’s brutal death, as though the snow was cleaning the wounds. “What does that even mean? It snows in the Antarctic in winter, doesn’t it, so how can it be too cold to snow in the UK when it’s minus five?”

  Pereira breathed out through her mouth, watched the mist dissipate into the falling snow.

  “The colder it is, the drier the air, so it makes it less likely to snow, that’s all.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Cold air holds less water vapour than warm air.”

  “Huh,” said Bain. “How d’you know that?”

  Pereira thought for a few moments, then said, “I read it on the back of a Frosties packet,” and Bain smiled.

  He rang the doorbell again, then knocked three times. Pereira shivered. The early morning had flown by in the usual pre-school rush, when doing anything as simple as checking the weather forecast and dressing appropriately had been so far from her mind as to have barely registered.

  Pereira tried the door handle, and the door opened. Glanced round at Bain, raised her eyebrow at the thought of what they were about to find, then pushed the door fully open and walked into the house.

  There was a small light on in the hallway, and an air of perfect silence in the house. Bain entered behind her, closed the door over against the winter’s day, and they stood side by side in the middle of the hall.

  “Mrs. Abernethy?” said Pereira, and then repeated the call with greater volume.

  “Out, drunk, asleep or dead?” said Bain, his voice low.

  “Presumably,” answered Pereira quietly, “if it was any of the first three, the front door would be locked. Killers, on the other hand, have less reason to lock doors on their way out … Come on, let’s start with the last place we saw her.”

  And she led the way along the corridor, past the bannister, past the large mirror with the gold frame, and the life-sized, bronze Highland terrier, and the copy of Turner’s Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, and the gold umbrella propped against the wall in the metal umbrella stand, which was strangely not by the door, but outside the downstairs toilet, and into the kitchen.