Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘Keith Teasdale does not use a knife in his work.’ He began to snigger again. ‘As far as I know, anyway.’

‘So what does he do exactly, sir?’

‘Keith Teasdale. Old Keith, eh? Expertise with a knife? Expertise with a yard brush, more like. Teasdale is a cleaner. He shoves a wet mop about the place. Not much of a lethal weapon, surely?’

‘I see.’

‘Unless you can be charged with being in possession of an offensive mop bucket.’

‘But they call him Slasher at the market,’ protested Fry.

‘We call him that here too,’ said the manager. ‘Ah, I see. What’s in a name? Is that evidence against him, then?’

Now another tissue had to be used. And this one did go to the face to mop up the tears. ‘Do you want me to tell you how he got the nickname “Slasher”?’

A man appeared in the doorway of the ante-room, hesitated when he saw the visitors and began to go away again with an apologetic nod.

‘Hey, Chris,’ called the manager. ‘This is the police. They want to know why we call Keith Teasdale “Slasher”!’

The other man began to laugh too. ‘Are you going to tell them?’

‘Of course. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — !’

‘Poor old Keith.’

They both laughed for a while. Fry was beginning to go pink with anger.

‘Basically, Keith Teasdale has a bladder problem,’ said the manager.

‘Sorry, didn’t I explain? We’re police officers, not doctors.’

‘No, but that’s why he got his nickname, you see. He’s always having a slash somewhere. Round the back of the building. In the lorry park. Over by the hedge there. It got to be a joke that any time you went round a corner, there was Keith having a slash. One day the ministry inspectors were here, and they saw him at it. He got a real ticking off then. Head office wanted me to sack him. But he’s harmless really. Since then, he’s had to put up with everyone calling him Slasher, though. It’s become quite a joke, I can tell you.’

‘I’m positively splitting my sides, as you can see, sir.’

The manager looked at her. ‘Well, you have to be a part of it to appreciate it, I suppose. You develop a peculiar sort of sense of humour working here.’

‘So I gather.’

When they finally located Keith Teasdale, he was digging a solidified mass of dead leaves out of a drain cover behind the abattoir. There was a curious smell on this side of the building, more reminiscent of a butcher’s shop than a hospital. But the brush Teasdale clutched in one hand looked particularly unthreatening.

‘I’ve already told you I’ve been up to Warren Leach’s place,’ he said.

‘Known him for long?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes, years. How old is his eldest lad, Will? Eleven? I remember when he was just a nipper. He wanted to help me with the rats once, because he took a liking to the terriers. But his dad stopped him coming near me. He always was a bit of a sour bugger, Warren.’

‘Would you say you know him well?’

‘No one knows Warren well. It doesn’t do to get too close to him. Nasty temper, he has.’

Teasdale folded his hands over the end of his brush. His fingers that had turned brown and creased and faintly shiny, matching his corduroy trousers.

‘But you’re still doing work for him. You were at Ringham Edge Farm on Sunday,’ pointed out Cooper.

‘I was. But Warren sent me packing, like I said. No money to pay for rodent control, he said. Can you believe it? That’s no good on a farm, no good at all. You can’t have rats round a milking parlour. It should be clean, like this place is.’

‘When was the last time you went before that?’

Teasdale rolled his eyes and chewed the tips of his moustache. ‘Can’t remember exactly. It’d be a month or two, anyway. Is it important, then? Am I a witness?’

‘Have you noticed anything unusual going on at the farm?’ asked Fry.

‘Unusual? There’s nothing much usual about Warren Leach.’

‘What about Mrs Leach? Do you know her?’

‘Her you never see. Well, maybe just a passing glimpse now and then. But she never speaks, never wants to say hello. She’s unsociable. But then, she is married to Warren, so you can’t blame her, I reckon.’

Teasdale seemed to get bored with the conversation suddenly and tossed his clump of leaves into a wheelbarrow, where they landed with a wet thud.

‘Did they tell you in there what they call me?’ he said, watching the leaves shift and settle in the barrow.

‘Yes, they did,’ said Cooper.

Teasdale nodded. ‘They love it. They think it’s a great laugh here, and at the mart. They usually tell people to ask me to demonstrate. Did they tell you that?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘But don’t bother.’

On the way to Ringham Edge, they had to slow down as they came up behind a tractor towing a trailer stacked high with bales of straw. Golden flakes spiralled off the load and drifted across the windscreen of the car.

‘When we get to the farm, I think we should make a point of trying to see all the Leach family,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s the purpose of that?’

‘There’s something wrong there.’

‘We’ve had no reports of anything wrong.’

Cooper glanced at her face, thinking again how thin she was becoming. It made her look gaunt and haunted rather than tough and angular, as she had been when she arrived a few months ago from West Midlands. Fry’s hair was shorter, too, as if she had taken scissors to it and hacked off a couple of inches in a bored moment.

There was one other thing that Cooper noticed about Diane Fry, though. She never mentioned his father now, not since that first time they had met. Sergeant Joe Cooper meant nothing to her.

He wondered what Fry did these days when she went off duty. He wondered what she would be doing tonight, after work. But, for once, Cooper found that his imagination failed him completely.

He had already agreed to go out for a drink with Todd Weenink that night. Weenink called it ‘a session’, which meant he intended to drink a lot of beer. Cooper wasn’t really looking forward to it. He would miss a rehearsal for the police male voice choir, and it was getting to their busiest time of year, when they performed at community halls and old people’s homes in the area. Besides, he had seen how morose and aggressive his colleague could become under the influence of alcohol.

But they were partners, and Cooper understood that these occasions were necessary, a kind of bonding. He thought Weenink had no one else to talk to since his marriage had ended. His relationships with women were probably not noted for their conversation. ‘A session’, he sensed, was code for Weenink needing someone to talk to, an admission that he was feeling lonely. That was why Cooper couldn’t refuse.

In the crew yard at Ringham Edge Farm, Warren Leach spoke to his sons in a voice thick with suppressed anger.

‘Bring that beast down here,’ he said.

The boys stood open-mouthed; Dougie was close to tears. They both knew about the death of animals. They had both seen the huge pit that the excavator had dug behind the barn a while ago, and had heard the shots as the ewes were dispatched one by one. Afterwards, they had crept out of the house to stand in horrified fascination on the edge of the newly turned earth. They had tried to imagine the lifeless bodies of the sheep below their feet; they had pictured them lying on their backs with their eyes blank and their thin legs stiff and pointing upwards, and the wet soil thick in their fleeces and in their mouths.

‘No. Please, Dad,’ said Will.

Leach lost his temper at the pleading tone, driven beyond patience.

‘Am I talking to that wall? Now shift your arses and get that beast down here! Do as I say! If I have to say it again, I’ll be saying it with this belt.’