Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Horse meat? Isn’t that illegal here?’

‘Ah now, there you’re wrong,’ said Hitchens. ‘It isn’t illegal, just culturally unacceptable. I hear it’s very popular among our friends in France and Italy, and no doubt other countries.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem,’ said Hitchens, ‘seems to be how this horse meat is sourced in the first place.’

‘What?’

Hitchens sighed. ‘This Rawson case gets more and more complicated. But let DC Cooper show you the film he was sent. The allegation seems to be that Patrick Rawson was obtaining horses to be sold for slaughter. When I say “obtaining”, we have to be open to the idea that some of the horses were stolen, or obtained by deception, don’t we?’

‘Yes, given his history. But, by slaughtered, you mean…?’

‘For human consumption.’

‘Oh, god.’

‘While you were in Sutton Coldfield,’ said Hitchens, ‘DC Irvine and DC Hurst came up with background on some of the contacts whose numbers were in Mr Rawson’s phone book. One of those is a company we might be interested in: R amp; G Enterprises. They have a small distribution centre on an enterprise park near Buxton.’

‘Distributing what?’ asked Fry, with a sinking heart.

Hitchens smiled. ‘Meat, of course.’

Down in the car park, a tow truck was bringing in Patrick Rawson’s Mitsubishi for closer forensic examination. Fry found Cooper watching it arrive from the window of the CID room.

‘Mr Rawson had hands-free mobile in the car, didn’t he?’ he said.

‘Yes, why?’ asked Fry.

Cooper shrugged. ‘It’s funny that he seems to have been more worried about getting caught using a mobile phone while driving than he was concerned about being convicted for fraud, or breaches of the Trade Descriptions Act.’

‘That doesn’t seem particularly odd to me.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Cooper. ‘So even Patrick Rawson had the feeling that he was more likely to be prosecuted if he was an easy target.’

He seemed to make the last comment to himself, so Fry ignored it.

‘We’re starting to get an angle on Mr Rawson’s business interests, anyway,’ she said. ‘This is almost a local one: R amp; G Enterprises Limited, with a trading address in Buxton. Directors are listed as Patrick Thomas Rawson and Maurice Gains.’

‘Mr Rawson, the man with his finger in lots of pies.’

‘And how many of them are dodgy?’ said Fry. ‘If you want something really frightening, Ben, have a read of this briefing.’

‘What’s this?’ Cooper took the file from her. ‘Trichinosis?’

‘It’s the latest reason for turning vegetarian.’

‘Oh, great.’

Cooper was silent as he read. Fry knew that the briefing was horribly specific about the progress of the disease. When any human being or animal ate meat that contained trichinella cysts, the acid in the stomach dissolved the hard covering, releasing larvae into the small intestine. Adults laid eggs, which developed into more larvae and travelled through the arteries to the muscles, where they curled into balls and became cysts again. And the cycle started over.

Most cases of trichinosis were mild, but if you didn’t get treatment with anti-inflammatory steroids, you could die. Someone in Paris had done exactly that, during the last French epidemic from eating raw horsemeat that originated in Poland.

‘This case in Paris,’ said Cooper. ‘Raw horse meat from Poland — It’s…’

Words seemed to fail him.

‘I know,’ said Fry.

She had begun to feel even sicker when she read the details of that case. An infected horse head had entered the human food chain. Not just meat, but the head. The number of people infected was explained by a high concentration of larvae in the horse’s carcass, and by the custom of mixing meat from several horses’ heads, to be eaten as raw mince.

Worst of all, the originating farm entered on official documents did not exist. No one would ever know where that outbreak of trichinosis had come from.

Fry looked up at Cooper when he’d finished reading. He looked just about as sick as she felt.

‘Will you take the abattoir, Ben?’ she said.

‘Oh, how did I guess? What about you?’

‘I’ll go where the meat is.’

The three men were on their weekly hike. They were three retired police officers, puffing a little as they reached the top of the track on the remaining unspoiled stretch of Longstone Moor.

Inquisitively, one of them diverted away from the path towards the deep gash of Watersaw Rake, the abandoned opencast quarry workings. There was a fence around the hole, but it was low enough to step over.

‘Careful, Jack,’ called one of his friends. ‘We’re not carrying you home if you break your leg.’

‘You’d think they’d do something with this,’ he said. ‘Fill it in, or whatever.’

‘They’ve certainly wrecked the hillside with their quarrying.’

‘It employs local people, though. That’s the important thing.’

His friends came to join him at the fence, pushing their way through the heather to find a rabbit track wide enough for their boots.

‘Come on, Jack. What are you doing?’

‘He still thinks he’s on the job. Always wants to know what’s going on.’

But the first man wasn’t listening to them. He was over the fence and looking down into the rake. The sides were steep and lined with shattered rock. The bottom was fifty feet below, littered with debris from the quarrying.

‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘Right on the bottom of the rake.’

‘Just rocks. Or a dead sheep.’

‘No. That’s not what it is.’

The Snake Pass had been closed between Glossop and Ladybower for several weeks after another landslip. The floods in January had also burst an old mining adit, the build-up of water cracking a hole the size of a railway tunnel in the side of Drake Hill.

It was proof, if anyone still needed it, that too much rain could change the landscape dramatically. If you watched the hills after a heavy downpour, you could see the smallest streams gushing into brown cascades as they tumbled into the valleys, washing down peat from the moors and loose stones from the hillsides.

But Cooper was driving eastwards from Ladybower, heading in towards Sheffield on the A57, now clear of the previous night’s fog. From Sheffield, he had to find his way north, skirting Howden Moors, to enter the tangle of former mill towns on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines.

DC Luke Irvine had declared himself free enough of the backlog of file preparation work to accompany Cooper on the trip to Yorkshire. Fry had looked a bit sceptical at first, but had given him the nod. Cooper was glad to have Luke with him. It made such a difference being in the car with the younger DC instead of travelling with Diane Fry and having to watch every word he said.

‘My family are from West Yorkshire,’ said Irvine as they came in sight of the wind farm near Penistone.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Cooper, who had assumed Irvine was of Scottish origin, what with his surname and the blue eyes, and the sandy hair.

‘Denby Dale, between Huddersfield and Barnsley. My Dad used to work in the mining-equipment industry, but his job went when all the pits closed down. So he got a job at Rolls-Royce in Derby. And the family moved down. I was only five at the time, so I don’t remember much about Denby Dale, except visiting my grandma.’

‘You never thought of going into engineering like your dad?’ asked Cooper.

‘No.’

Irvine said it so abruptly that Cooper wondered what the story was behind his decision to join the police. There was a long history of conflict between the police and men working in the coal industry, going back to the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Communities had been split, families divided, and the resulting bad blood had lingered for twenty-five years in some areas. He decided it might be better not to ask — until he knew Luke better, anyway.