Stolen

by Paul Finch

  Static crackled, before Inspector Rick Crawley, heading up the TAU, responded. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Tine to move, sir. Can you block the gate on Wellspring Lane, over?’

  ‘Roger, received.’

  Lucy glanced at Geraldson, who nodded wordlessly, his mouth clamped shut. And then, inside the old barn, men began shouting, bellowing encouragement, but laughing too, with an angry, raucous delight. The barking took on a new, savage, monstrous overtone.

  ‘All units,’ Lucy said into the mic. ‘Hit ’em!’

  Sergeant Frobisher and Malcolm Peabody’s eight-strong snatch squad broke cover and scampered across the grass, dark and stealthy in the night, the only sound a clack of visors being snapped down and a repeating metallic click as Autolock batons were flicked open.

  She turned and stooped out through the small rear entrance of the hide onto the access lane behind. Here, screened by late-summer undergrowth, several RSPCA vans were parked, their personnel standing around in taut silence. Lucy signalled to them and walked around to the front, pushing through the foliage and onto open ground. She wasn’t fully armoured like the snatch squads, but she wore a stab-vest and basic Kevlar padding over her scruffs.

  The RSPCA officers followed her out, wearing thick handling gloves, carrying deterrent sprays and poles with slip-leads attached. Well-equipped as they were, they kept a safe distance behind.

  From this angle, the pony paddock lay in front of them. More police officers were scurrying across it from its eastern perimeter wall. As Lucy veered towards the farm, Mandy Mahoney had waddled back into view, heaving another crate of beer, apparently unperturbed by the terrible sounds emanating from the barn and seemingly oblivious to the advancing forces. Several pairs of moving headlights also caught Lucy’s attention. Along Wellspring Lane, on the far side of the paddock, three large vehicles – the TAU troop-carriers – were slowing to a halt in front of the farm gate. The gateman was slow to respond, probably because he was stumped by the sight of them. However, half a second later, he was haring back down the farm track, shouting hoarsely and incoherently.

  Lucy switched on her loudhailer and raised it to her lips.

  ‘Leslie Mahoney!’ she called, her voice projected across the darkened meadow. ‘This is Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn of Crowley CID. You and your friends are all being arrested under Section 8 of the Animal Welfare Act. The entire plot is surrounded, Mahoney … so I want you all to come out of that barn right now. Bring your dogs with you and keep them in check. Make sure they’re muzzled and leashed. Anyone resisting will also be arrested for assaulting police officers and assault with intent to resist arrest. Anyone using a dog to resist will be arrested for attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.’

  Forty yards ahead, Mandy stood frozen in place as she listened to this message from the darkness. But only when Frobisher’s snatch squad burst into the light, having advanced across the paddock in complete invisibility, did she respond, dropping the crate of beer and running comically towards the barn. Some of the men inside, presumably those closest to the main doors, had also heard. Heads were fleetingly stuck out, and then disappeared again. The wild shouting inside took on notes of panic and then hysteria. Several seconds later, a confused knot of bodies emerged, both human and canine, the animals leaping and whining in confusion, the men hauling on their chains. Those unencumbered by dogs ran every which way, but already there was no escape. The snatch squad from the woods on the west side of the farm surged into view from between the decayed buildings, shouting orders and warnings. Other uniformed cops emerged from around the back of the barn.

  The men and dogs scrambled for their cars, and there were gut-thumping collisions as the officers piled into them. Despite this, several vehicles started up, but as they all sought to rev away up the track at the same time, they slid into each other, clunking and shunting, grinding to a chaotic halt. The couple that managed to get ahead of this tangle only made it a few dozen yards, before the sight of a police troop-carrier blocking the gate and a whole phalanx of TAU men, as well armed and armoured as the divisional lads and yet somehow looking more menacing, more military as they advanced down the dirt track, brought them to a halt. The next thing, doors were being yanked open and burly policemen dragging out the drivers and their passengers.

  Lucy lowered her loudhailer as she entered the farmyard.

  Arrests were being made on all sides. There was no serious violence, but there were struggles as brutish, swearing men were wrestled to the floor and clapped into cuffs. One was struck across the back of the knee with a baton to help him comply. The dogs would have been a problem, especially as several had got loose and were darting back and forth, but they were all still muzzled, and now, at Lucy’s direction, the RSPCA handlers came forward to take charge of them.

  ‘Prisoner transports move in,’ Lucy told her radio. ‘We’ve got a large number detained.’

  One suspect, a younger guy with longish, fair hair, wearing what looked like a wolf-fur doublet, made a semi-successful break for it, shaking off a lone PC and racing onto the open ground of the pony paddock, veering towards Wellspring Lane – only to stop at the sight of several more police vans pulling up behind the troop-carriers. He didn’t know they were divisional vans coming to take prisoners, and, thinking they were yet more police reinforcements, slowed to a trudging halt before dropping to his knees and raising his hands, allowing the pursuing officers to take him into custody.

  Lucy was still in the thick of the action, though it was mostly over. On all sides, cautions were being issued, and the responses, mainly f-words and other more imaginative profanities, being recorded on dictaphone as the jostling, cuffed men were frogmarched to the farm cottage wall and held there, each by his individual arresting officer, while others commenced searching them. One resisted more than the rest, kicking out and spitting, and was given a backhander across the mouth for his trouble. Lucy wasn’t worried. When the evidence was finally presented, she doubted there was a magistrate in the land who’d be swayed by farcical complaints about police brutality.

  Quite a bit of that evidence was on display inside the barn itself, when she went in there. The centrepiece was a purpose-built pit, squarish in shape, about ten yards by ten, dug to a depth of five feet and lined with brick, with a steel ladder fixed in one corner and a camera mounted on a tripod overlooking it, alongside an upright chalkboard scribbled with betting information.

  Two dogs still occupied the pit. One, an American pit bull, charged crazily back and forth, jumping up to snap and snarl at the officers, despite the excessive blood dabbling its jaws and jowls. The other one, whose breed was uncertain, lay in a quivering, panting heap, gashed and torn and spattered with gore.

  ‘We need one of the vets in here,’ Lucy said to a PC at her shoulder. ‘And a handler … to control the other one, yeah?’

  The PC moved away, just as acting DC Tessa Payne, a young black officer, formerly in uniform but currently on secondment to Crowley CID as a trainee, leaned in through a doorway connecting to another outbuilding. Like Lucy, she only wore light body-armour over her jumper and jeans and was in the process of pulling off her protective gloves and replacing them with latex.

  ‘Lucy …’ she said. ‘You might want to look in here.’

  ‘This going to make me throw up?’ Lucy said.

  ‘More likely make you dance a jig.’

  Lucy went through into what was a basically a lean-to shed lit by a single electric bulb, its damp walls lined with shelves groaning beneath the grisly accoutrements of dog-fighting. She saw piles of spare muzzles and harnesses, stacks of grubby second-hand magazines with grotesque images on their covers, homemade DVDs, DIY veterinary kits, including staple-guns and tubes of superglue, and a number of ‘breaking sticks’, thick wooden bars impressed with toothmarks, which would normally be used to pry open a victorious animal’s jaws when it had them locked into its latest victim.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Bloody perfect. All
this needs bagging and tagging, Tessa.’

  Payne nodded, at which point they were distracted by the sound of more canine whining. The outhouse had its own outer door – again just a frame with no actual door in it. On the other side they found an enclosed yard containing a set of weighing scales, a treadmill and a large glass tank, very grimy and filled to the brim with water so filthy and green that it was almost opaque. There was also a row of grillwork cages with crudely built kennels attached. Each was occupied by a dog, but these were animals of a different ilk to those they’d seen so far. They were highly subdued, lying still with ears flat, each one watching the humans beyond their cages with fearful intensity.

  And it was clear why.

  They were brutally scarred, in many cases so bitten and ragged that the fur was entirely missing from their faces. Several had lost so much flesh from their jowls that their teeth were exposed. At least a couple were missing an eye, the empty sockets crudely sutured shut. Lucy saw ears hanging in ribbons, paws chewed into lame, leathery stumps. The reason for that was evident in their breeds, for these were mostly mongrels, but those that weren’t were recognisable as Labradors, spaniels and retrievers, suburban pets rather than fighting-dogs.

  ‘Bait,’ Lucy observed as she walked along the cages.

  ‘Looks like this is where all the abductees we’ve been hearing about have finished up,’ Payne said, following.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No sign of the black van yet, though.’

  ‘We need to keep looking.’

  To Lucy’s mind, the existence of ‘bait dogs’ was one of the most sickening aspects of the whole dog-fighting disgrace. That these trusting, innocent creatures could be thrown into the pit repeatedly as part of a callous training regime for the fighting-dogs, where they’d be attacked mercilessly, again and again, by savage beasts that wanted nothing more than to senselessly kill anything they were faced with, didn’t bear thinking about. But that such a thing could happen to one-time pets, allegedly stolen from loving homes by this mysterious black van that had been reported several times when an animal had vanished, was somehow even more horrible.

  ‘We need the vets again,’ Lucy said, to which the younger detective nodded and hurried away.

  ‘At least you’re not going to need them in here,’ a voice said.

  She glanced around, and saw Malcolm Peabody leaning out through the entrance to an ugly breezeblock building with no glass in its windows and a sagging tarpaper roof. He’d removed his ballistics helmet and now carried it under one arm. His hair was damp and spiky, his freckled features greased with sweat. Normally an affable young bloke with a great enthusiasm for the job, his expression was grim and angry, his pallor waxen.

  Deeply apprehensive, Lucy followed him inside.

  Torchlight revealed that it was a basic shell of a room with bare walls and a rugged concrete floor. It was also stained with the blood of ages and strewn with dog carcasses. There were at least ten of them, all relatively recent; Lucy could tell that because flies buzzed everywhere, and a fetid odour thickened the air. She surveyed the heap of twisted forms with what a stranger might have called indifference, but in truth was cold professionalism. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect her, it was simply that, twelve years in, Lucy was a veteran of this kind of ghastliness, and she knew that to get emotional would only cloud her judgement.

  Peabody, a relative newbie, was less in control.

  ‘These are obviously the ones they couldn’t use any more,’ he said, looking nauseous as he indicated a heavy mallet hanging from a nail by a leather strap. ‘And this is how they put them out of their misery.’

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Lucy replied. ‘Don’t touch anything. Not till we’ve had Photographic in here.’

  They stepped back outside into the fresher air, and Lucy indicated to one of the other uniforms to come and stand by the door. Walking back through the barn, they came to the farmyard where the prisoners were lined up, their details and the details of the officers who’d detained them being tabulated by Sergeant Frobisher to ensure there’d be no confusion back at Custody. One by one, the prisoner transports were reversing into place, their back doors swinging along with the cage doors inside.

  ‘Your cards are fucking marked!’ the hefty figure of Mandy Mahoney squawked as two armoured policewomen frogmarched her to a waiting police car. As the only female detainee, she would travel separately from the others. ‘All you pigs … you’re all fucking marked!’

  Not far behind her, the even more ponderous and dishevelled shape of Les Mahoney was also manhandled forward. He stank of sweat, and when he grinned at Lucy, showed a full set of rotten teeth.

  ‘Sorry to disrupt your evening’s entertainment, Mr Mahoney,’ she said.

  His grin never faltered. ‘Fuck you, you slip of a tart.’ Hawking a green one, he spat it on the floor at her feet. ‘And tell your fucking clodhopping arse-bandit mates not to make too much of a mess, or I’ll sue the fucking lot of you.’

  ‘Some chance,’ Peabody retorted. ‘You’re going to jail, pal.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Mahoney guffawed. ‘Good. I could use a five-month holiday … you spotty-faced lump of dogshit.’

  Peabody lurched forward, but Lucy physically restrained him.

  ‘Get him out of my sight,’ she said.

  Mahoney laughed loudly and brashly as he was led away.

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Last of the old-school charmers, eh?’

  Peabody scowled. ‘It’s right what he said though. We’ll be lucky if he gets any more than a slapped wrist for this. We should drive the bastard around a corner somewhere and smack the living crap out of him … just in case he gets a free ride later.’

  Lucy watched as they assisted the cuffed Mahoney into one of the vans. ‘What’ve I told you about getting too involved, Malcolm? You won’t go the distance if you let this job screw with your head. Those things back there … they’re just animals.’ She patted his cheek before walking away. ‘Wait till you see it done to humans.’

  Chapter 2

  Though she’d worn a uniform for the first decade of her career, Lucy Clayburn had now been a detective constable for two years, but in all that time she had only ever worked her home patch of Crowley, Greater Manchester Police’s legendary November Division.

  The one-time industrial town – though these days it was more a post-industrial wasteland – had an infamous reputation for villainy, though it probably wasn’t any more deserved than those bad reps attached to other northern English cities where full employment was a thing of the past and drugs and alcohol had flowed in to fill the gap.

  The problem with being a police officer – anywhere really, not just in a place like Crowley – was that you knew what went on behind the sometimes paper-thin façade of the local community. So she wasn’t entirely surprised that night of Wednesday, September 12, to look down the list of prisoners waiting in the traps at Robber’s Row police station, November Division’s HQ, and see that they included professional men with sedate family backgrounds: a senior civil servant, a local journalist, an estate agent, even a bank manager. There were louts and scallies among them too, all the usual suspects; but respectability was a keyword where several were concerned, or superficial respectability at least. Maybe, to an extent, she should have anticipated this, because dog-fighting wouldn’t have existed at all, even as an illegal sport, without the hefty cashflow it generated. It was only ever about gambling, and if you didn’t have the readies for that, you couldn’t participate.

  ‘Worrying, isn’t it?’ Lucy said, scrolling down the file on the screen belonging to Sergeant Joe Cullen, the Robber’s Row custody officer. ‘Lots of these guys come over as perfect citizens … so able to create the impression they’re normal that they can function easily in everyday society. They do jobs efficiently and make them pay. They impress socially. They have friends, families. But deep down, they’re so disturbed that they derive pleasure from watching innocent animals rip each other apart. Eithe
r that, or they’re so indifferent to it that they don’t care so long as they make a few quid.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the thin end of the wedge, to be honest,’ Cullen replied. He was a foursquare old-schooler, with a weathered hangdog face and a brush of thick grey bristles on his head. ‘If they’re prepared to do this, what else are they up to? Like you say … they’re not normal.’

  ‘Mahoney’s solicitor here yet?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Doesn’t want one,’ Cullen replied.

  She arched an eyebrow.

  Cullen shrugged. ‘Asked him twice, but he insists he’ll be fine. Confident little toe-rag, I’ll say that for him.’

  ‘So, Mr Mahoney,’ Lucy said, ‘you understand that you remain under caution?’

  Mahoney nodded. Still in the scruffy, rancid clothes they’d arrested him in, still smelling of sweat and cigarettes, he slouched on the other side of the interview room table, grinning.

  Lucy rolled back the sleeves of her sweater and got the ball rolling. ‘For the benefit of the tape, we’re in Interview Room 3, Robber’s Row police station. I’m DC Lucy Clayburn, in company with acting DC Tessa Payne. This is the interview of Leslie Mahoney. Interview commencing –’ she glanced at the clock on the wall ‘– 11.15pm.’ She watched him carefully. ‘So, Mr Mahoney … how was your day?’

  Mahoney guffawed with laughter. ‘That’s a funny one, I must admit.’

  ‘No more effing and blinding?’

  He shrugged. ‘Just caught me at a bad moment, that’s all.’

  ‘The moment you’re referring to, of course, was the moment when you were arrested outside your home tonight, at 39, Wellspring Lane. Isn’t that correct?’

  ‘Yeah … that’s correct.’

  ‘I’m guessing you’re also aware why you’ve been—?’

  ‘Let’s not fuck about, love. You’ve got me for running professional dog-fights.’

  Lucy remained cool. ‘You don’t seem too concerned.’