by Vanda Symon
‘Wankers!’ I banged the steering wheel again in a pointless display of frustration. If I was going to make any headway on this case, I had to figure out how it was all connected: TB – Gaby – cattle rustling – murder – me. It was all linked, but how, specifically? God, I wished I still had Gaby’s computer. Or my own, for that matter. What I needed was some old-fashioned information, and the only place I was going to find it at 9.30am on a Saturday was at the library. The Mataura library didn’t open on the weekend, but Gore did, and it had free internet access. I could get Maggie to come with me. She’d probably be keen for a jaunt to get some new books. And that way, not only would I have some welcome company but, as an added bonus, it would get me out of Mataura while Gaby’s funeral was on. The last thing I needed to do was hide myself away at home feeling rejected.
Between being ordered away from funerals and thrown off people’s properties, I was starting to feel like an outcast in my own town.
43
A wodge of junk mail was half sticking out of the letter box and a couple of extra brochures had escaped onto the ground at the base of the post it perched on. Good to see the ‘No flyers’ sticker was being taken seriously. I parked Maggie’s Honda in the carport and wandered back up the drive to the box to empty it out. I couldn’t believe how much crap advertising found its way into it from such a small town. It wasn’t like we were flush with supermarkets and big-ticket retailers. I picked the bits off the ground and pulled the remainder out of the front. No wonder they were hanging out – when I peered through the slot I could see a parcel occupying most of the space. What had Maggie been buying online this time?
I swung open the flap at the back and extracted the brown-paper-wrapped package. The name Shephard was scrawled across it in what looked like permanent marker. Strange, I wasn’t expecting anything. I turned it over to see if there was a name on it and noted the dark stains on the underside about the same time as I noted the rather unpleasant smell. I stood staring at it a while, my curiosity about what it could be fighting with the sense of dread that was starting to build in my stomach. I crouched down and placed it on the ground, took a breath and pulled away the pieces of tape holding the parcel together. Then, with as much courage as I could muster, I pulled back the flaps.
The rabbit was curled up like a soft toy, except that this was no toy. Toys didn’t ooze blood. Toys weren’t stiff with rigor mortis. And toys sure as hell didn’t have a miniature noose around their necks.
A cold sweat broke out across my face and I leaped to my feet, staggering back away from the gruesome sight. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears, my heart racing. The irrational part of me wanted to kick it away, get it as far away as possible. But the stone-cold-sober part of me was transfixed. Who the hell would do this? If this was a joke, it had gone way too far. I looked up and down the road, imagined a set of eyes observing me, laughing. Get a grip, Shep. Whoever did this would be long gone. My eyes flicked towards the house. Thank Christ it was me who found it, and not Maggie. She couldn’t know about this; it would freak her out completely. But what to do? I couldn’t toss it in the wheelie bin. The stench would be enough to give it away. Besides, the cop in me was thinking evidence. This was an out-and-out threat. There could be fingerprints, trace. But where the hell could I hide it? I grimaced in distaste as I bent back down and folded the edges of the paper back over, then wrapped it in a few of the larger brochures that had been in the box. There was a ramshackle shed down the back of the section where we kept the lawnmower. It would have to go in there for now.
That was the easy part. The hard part was going to be pretending to Maggie that, apart from being a murder suspect, a pariah in my own town and now shit-scared, there was absolutely nothing wrong.
44
I had almost forgotten how liberating the regular beat of pounding the road could be. Although it had only been a couple of days since I’d last gone running, I had a vague tinge of guilt, as if I had neglected a friend and needed to make a special effort to make up for it.
My head was awash with information. My trip to the library and the information superhighway had only added to the congestion, and offered no enlightenment. My hope was that if I voided my overloaded conscious with the hypnotic trance of a run, my subconscious would get to work and map things out. It had often worked in the past. I’d experienced many an epiphany while running in the fresh air and wide open spaces.
I made a concerted effort to blot out thoughts of the case, Cole, the battle zone that was my life, the now constant urge to look over my shoulder, and instead concentrated on the smaller details at my feet: the chunkiness of the chip in the road, the texture created by the white paint of the centre line as it melted its way around each stone, the reflective matchsticks standing to attention like oversized toy soldiers guarding the verge.
My eyes feasted on the gentle contours of the land, the lush green pastures peppered with a seasoning of grazing sheep and cattle. They followed the path of the river as it meandered through this fertile land fringed with willow and birch. The feathered heads of the toetoe hedges waved a syncopated rhythm against their flaxen bodies.
My lungs gorged themselves on the fresh, earthy, country air, flavoured with a hint of – what was that? Smoke? I pulled up, panting hard, and tried to pause long enough to inhale through my nose. It was definitely smoke, with a decidedly acrid edge to it. There was no visible sign of it, but I was climbing up to a bend that would open out to a valley. Perhaps I’d get a view of it there. I picked up pace again, curious about what anyone could be burning to create that kind of stench. There were no farmhouses in the vicinity, so it was unlikely to be a rubbish fire. Perhaps some campers by the river, flouting the fire ban?
After I crested the hill, I could see a plume of blackish smoke rising from a stand of willows that bordered the river below me. It looked to be a good two kilometres away by the circuitous road, but I was intrigued now, and it wasn’t as if I had anywhere else to be.
I came to a gated access way to the river. The track, to use a very generous description, wended its way in the direction of the smoke. It was well overgrown with spindly grasses and weeds, although it did look like a vehicle had been down recently. You’d need a sturdy truck or four-wheel drive to negotiate that one. I climbed over the gate and made my way towards the pyre, but not before having a good check up and down the road. It was pretty isolated down here, and the spooked part of me had got in the habit of scoping everything and planning an escape route. Through the screen of trees, I could now make out the outline of a smoking mass the size of a van. The stench that came from it was enough to turn my stomach. The flames had died down to a few small licks amid the glowing bed of embers at the bottom, but it was the strange, angular projections jutting out of the pyre that really caught my attention.
‘Oh, bloody hell.’
I now knew what had happened to the stolen cattle. Legs, stiff and lance-like; ribs; heads: it was enough to turn a girl vegetarian. I put my hands over my nose and mouth, and skirted around the fire from upwind in the futile hope the stench would be less eye-watering, but it did nothing to curb the charred smell of death. I was glad I hadn’t eaten recently.
A rough estimate accounted for six beasts, but there could have been others at the bottom of the heap. The carcasses were by no means intact. Muscle and tissue had been carved away, leaving exposed bone covered in loose chunks of charred meat. It didn’t look like a professional butchering job, so chances were whoever did this wasn’t on the production line at the works, but they had scored a good haul of meat.
I stared at the forlorn sight of a cow’s head that had partially escaped the effects of the fire. Half of its face was blackened and crisp, the other relatively unscathed, other than the hair being singed off and the muzzle blistered. Whoever had done this had not done a very good job of burning this lot. Why, I wondered, did they go to the trouble of burning them at all? This spot was isolated enough that you could have just left the carca
sses in a rotting heap and no one would have discovered them for weeks, months even. By then the flies and maggots would have done the dirty work. Burning the carcasses only attracted attention – I was here, after all.
I walked around the pyre again, giving it a wide berth. It seemed an undignified and downright wasteful end for these beasts. The wind made a slight shift and I found myself in the path of the smoke trail. I moved over a bit and crouched down on my haunches. My mouth was parched and dry, and not helped at all by the smoke, but I wasn’t desperate enough to go over to the river for a drink: the sight of these cattle beasts dumped so thoughtlessly made me wonder what had made its way into the Mataura’s flowing waters.
Besides, there was something that really bugged me about that half-burned animal, other than the obvious nastiness of the whole scene. I cocked my head to the side and peered closely at one of the other beasts; then I got up and quickly walked around the rest in the pyre to confirm it.
Ear tags. None of them had their ear tags. I scanned around the base and the embers, looking for … I wasn’t quite sure what. Little puddles of yellow plastic? But old Half-Face still nagged at me.
I had to get a whole lot closer to the pyre than I wanted to, and the heat and the stench drove me back a couple of times, but at last I was able to get close enough for a quick but targeted look. It was all I needed. This beast’s ear tags had been ripped off. I could make out the telltale tear.
I retreated to a safe distance, sat down and leaned against the trunk of a willow to ponder the significance of it all. I was grateful for the breeze and the sound of it rustling the leaves above me, adding to the chorus from the river. I swatted at a sandfly on my leg – unfortunately, the smoke wasn’t acting as a deterrent to the pesky blighters.
Why would you want to hide the animals’ identities if you had only stolen them for meat? For that matter, why would you burn them? It didn’t add up. If you were desperate enough to rustle cattle and hack them up, why not just dump the carcasses on the side of the road? Hell, you could dump them in the middle of the main street early on a Saturday morning and no one would see you do it. I idly pushed backwards and forwards on my heels, digging little trenches in the river shingle.
Identity. This had to be all about identity. What was special about these particular cattle? I thought about Trev and his breeding stock. They were valuable; could this be an inside job for the insurance? What would a top stud beast be worth? Five, ten thousand dollars? But Trev didn’t strike me as being financially challenged. The equipment in his office was not your run-of-the-mill, package-deal stuff. There was a fair investment in technology parked on his desk, and he was pretty business savvy and up with the play. Likewise, Phillip Rawlings wasn’t short of a dollar. No, it couldn’t be about money.
Another memory of my visit to Trev made me laugh out loud. That was a very large chunk of beef roasting in his oven on the day I called by, and it was a damned sight better cooked than the burnt offerings here. He could have arranged for a few head of cattle to be taken, and a few from down the road to throw the scent off. I could imagine him being too Scottish to waste perfectly good meat, even if it was for a good cause. But what cause? Was he a gambling man? Had the odds played against him recently? Was he a bit skint? I’d seen him in the pub displaying all the signs of intoxication often enough, but couldn’t recall ever seeing him at one of the pokie machines, gambling his life savings away.
I picked up a pebble and tossed it up and down in my hand a couple of times to test its weight. Then I threw it hard, enjoying the thwack as it hit the sapling I had taken aim at. I followed it up with another: perfect shot. The product of a misspent youth trying to keep up with my brothers. Thwack. Give me a target and I could hit it with anything: rock, ball, bullet. My brothers didn’t enjoy being beaten by their little sis. I’d even won an axe-throwing competition at the local Agricultural and Pastoral Show when I was a teenager. I didn’t think the boys had ever forgiven me for that. I pulled my mind back to the case and Gaby’s enquiries for her journalism course.
These beasts could have had TB. But so what? That wasn’t the end of the world – it just meant more intensive monitoring. A pain in the arse? Yes. An impact on profit? Yes. Catastrophic? No. I didn’t think it was serious enough to provoke someone to commit what was basically fraud. I tried to replay as much of my conversation with Trev as I could remember. Each animal was tagged to track its whereabouts from cradle to grave – an audit trail for potential disease testing and control…
A tingle shot up my spine, accompanied by an uneasy sensation growing in my stomach. All along, I had felt there was a connection here – a connection between Gaby’s research and her murder – but TB was too mundane a threat to lead to that. Had I been too narrow in my thinking? There were plenty of nasties other than TB.
I jumped to my feet again, rubbed the numbness out of my bum, then started to pace around the remains of the fire, my mind working to piece it out with each step.
Trev was passionate about his beasts, to the extent of having portraits of his prize breeding stock on the walls – and that included his beloved stolen bull, Samson, over whom he had even shed a few tears. All sentiment aside, I would wager that Samson had finished up on this pyre. The only reason you’d go to this much trouble and actually burn the carcasses would be to prevent identification of one or more individual animals. Prevent any possible identification from photographs. Lose them in the crowd. To hide what, though? Disease? Or, perhaps more importantly, to destroy the bodies and prevent any post-mortem tissue testing. But testing for what? DNA? How would that be useful?
I stared at the beasts as my mind flipped through the internet pages Gaby had looked at recently – and a dawning possibility whacked me straight between the eyes.
‘Holy shit and Christ Almighty.’
There had been more than one disease state listed on those pages, and many had scary consequences. There had been an outbreak of mycoplasma bovis recently, and its spread was causing concern, to the extent that farmers were having to slaughter stock en masse. An inconvenience, yes, and tragic for the poor farmers concerned, but it wasn’t the worst. The most catastrophic of these diseases related to cattle, but had ramifications for humans as well. I shook my head – this was far-fetched, but it had to be it; I couldn’t think of anything else that would scare a man enough to do all this and even commit a murder.
BSE, bovine spongiform encephalitis. Mad-frigging-cow disease. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it could be the only thing that could provoke someone to go to so much trouble, to react so extremely. Look at what was smouldering before me. It was the perfect way to hide an outbreak, really: fake the cattle rustling, so the affected beast or beasts just happen to be taken. Make it look like a heist for meat, burn the carcasses, so the brain and spinal tissue is useless for testing and no one need suspect a thing. Except that someone did suspect, or had come too close to discovering the truth. I found my eyes welling up at the thought of Gaby being murdered for the sake of a few rotten bloody head of cattle.
But Trev? How could Trev do something like that? He’d been so friendly and helpful; Jesus, he even helped me search for Gaby’s body. Perhaps it was Phillip Rawlings: his cattle had been stolen too. But no, he didn’t breed. It had to be Trev.
Anyway, what was I thinking? BSE? That was impossible. New Zealand had never had a case of BSE; our domestically bred cattle were free of the disease. The only risk of it entering the country was through imported stock, and imports had been banned from Britain and Europe for years. But what about those other countries – Canada, Japan, the United States? They’d all had recent scares. Shit, Trev had said Samson was bred on the farm, but was descended from an import – I couldn’t recall exactly where from. Somewhere in Britain, maybe? I was going to have to find out.
BSE couldn’t have got here in stock feed. New Zealand had strict regulations on what farm animals could be fed, so the disease couldn’t spread by animals eating contami
nated meat meal. Anyway, we didn’t have all those wide open spaces for nothing – our animals fed on pasture. For BSE to get here it would have to have been preexisting in an imported animal. It could only be Samson’s grandsire or great grandsire, or whatever generation it was. Which was another point. If BSE had come in with an infected import, then that was generations ago. It didn’t spread easily, and surely it would have been picked up on post-mortem testing of the original animal. Maggie might be able to help me out there – perhaps her lab had tested that beast?
My mind seemed to lurch from one far-fetched idea to another. Could it be another disease altogether? Foot-and-mouth? I discounted that idea straight away. Foot-and-mouth spread like wildfire; the external symptoms were obvious, with blistering on the mouth and feet and frothing at the mouth. You’d never manage to hide it. BSE seemed so unlikely, but it was the only thing I could think of that was major enough to trigger such an extreme response – something worth killing for.
Christ, what to do?
First, I had to get in touch with Paul, let him know about this pile of burning cow flesh and sound him out about my theory. Then, I had to go back and see Trev. I’d have to tread carefully. If I could confirm where that import came from, what year it arrived and ultimately what had happened to him I’d have enough evidence – well, not evidence, but potential motive to get a warrant and get him arrested and in for questioning.
Rotten bloody cows. Gaby was dead, Lockie without his wife and Angel motherless, all because of some rotten bloody cows.
Out of impulse I picked up a large stone and threw it at Half Face’s head, hard.