Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

Logan shrugged, threading the car through the barricade of press cameras, microphones and spotlights. ‘You’re lucky. He shouts at me every bloody day.’

Isobel just sat there in frosty silence, seething.

Thompson’s Cash and Carry was a long breezeblock warehouse in Altens: a soulless business park on the southernmost tip of Aberdeen. The building was huge, filled with rows and rows of high, deep shelves that stretched off into the distance, miserable beneath the flicker of fluorescent lighting and the drone of piped muzak. The manager’s office was halfway up the end wall, a flight of concrete steps leading to a shiny blue door with ‘YOUR SMILE IS OUR GREATEST ASSET’ written on it. If that was the case, they were all screwed, because everyone looked bloody miserable.

The man in charge of Thompson’s Cash and Carry was no exception. They’d dragged him out of his bed at half four in the morning and it showed: bags under the eyes, blue stubble on his jowly face, wearing a suit that probably cost a fortune, but looked as if someone had died in it. Mr Thompson peered out of the picture window that made up one wall of his office, watching as uniformed officers picked their way through the shelves of jelly babies, washing powder and baked beans. ‘Oh God...’

‘And you’re quite sure,’ said Logan, sitting in a creaky leather sofa with a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit, ‘there haven’t been any breakins?’

‘No. I mean, yes. I’m sure.’ Thompson crossed his arms, paced back and forth, uncrossed his arms. Sat down. Stood up again. ‘It can’t have come from here: we’ve got someone onsite twenty-four-seven, a state-of-the-art security system.’

Logan had met their state-of-the-art security system — it was a sixty-eight-year-old man called Harold. Logan had sneezed more alert things than him.

Thompson went back to the window. ‘Have you tried speaking to the ship’s crew? Maybe they—’

‘Who supplies your meat, Mr Thompson?’

‘It... depends what it is. Some of the pre-packaged stuff comes from local butchers — it’s cheaper than hiring someone in-house to hack it up — the rest comes from abattoirs. We use three—’ He flinched as a loud, rattling crash came from the cash and carry floor below, followed by a derisory cheer and some slow handclapping. ‘You promised me they’d be careful! We’re open in an hour and a half; I can’t have customers seeing the place in a mess.’

Logan shook his head. ‘I think you’ve got more important things to worry about, sir.’

Thompson stared at him. ‘You can’t think we had anything to do with this! We’re a family firm. We’ve been here for nearly thirty years.’

‘That container came from your cash and carry with bits of human meat in it.’

‘But—’

‘How many other shipments do you think went out to the rigs like that? What if you’ve been selling chunks of dead bodies to catering companies for months? Do you think the guys who’ve been eating chopped-up corpses offshore are going to be happy about it?’

Mr Thompson blanched and said, ‘Oh God...’ again.

Logan drained the last of his coffee and stood. ‘Where did the meat in that container come from?’

‘I... I’ll have to look in the dockets.’

‘You do that.’

The cash and carry’s chill room sat on the opposite side of the building, separated from the shelves of tins and dried goods by a curtain of thick plastic strips that kept the cold in and the muzak out. A huge refrigeration unit bolted to the wall rattled away like a perpetual smoker’s cough, making the air cold enough that Logan’s breath trailed behind him in a fine mist as he marched between the boxes of fruit and vegetables, over to the walk-in freezer section.

Detective Constable Rennie stood beside the freezer’s heavy steel doors, hands jammed deep in his armpits, nose Rudolfred, dressed like a ninja version of the Michelin Man in layers and layers of black clothing.

‘It’s freezing in here,’ said the constable, shivering, ‘think my nipples just fell off.’

Logan stopped, one hand on the freezer’s door-handle. ‘You’d be a lot warmer if you actually did some work.’

Rennie pulled a face. ‘The Ice Queen thinks we’re all too thick to help. I mean, it’s not my fault I don’t know what I’m looking for, is it?’

‘What?’ Logan closed his eyes and tried counting to ten. Got as far as three. ‘For God’s sake; you’re supposed to be looking for human remains !’

‘I know that. I’m in there, standing in a sodding freezer the size of my house, looking at rows and rows of frozen bits of bloody meat. How am I supposed to tell a joint of pork from a joint of person? It all looks the same to me. A hand, a foot, a head: that I could recognize. But it’s all just chunks of meat.’ He shifted, stomping his feet and blowing into his cupped hands. ‘I’m a policeman, not a bloody doctor.’

And Logan had to admit he had a point. They only knew that the joint of meat found in the offshore container was human because it had a pierced nipple. Farmers were an odd lot, but not that odd.

Logan hauled open the heavy metal door and stepped into the freezer... Dear God it was cold — like being punched in the chest by a bag of ice. His breath went from mist to impenetrable fog. ‘Hello?’

He found Dr Isobel McAllister on the other side of a stack of cardboard boxes, their brown surfaces sparkling with a crisp film of white ice. She’d traded in her white SOC oversuit for a couple of dirty-blue parkas and a set of padded trousers, the ensemble topped off with a red and white bobble hat bandaged onto her head with a tatty maroon scarf. Not exactly her usual catwalk self. She was picking her way through a mound of frozen mystery meat.

‘Anything?’

She scowled up at him. ‘Other than hypothermia?’ When Logan didn’t answer, Isobel sighed and pointed at a big plastic crate stacked with chunks of vacuum-packed meat. ‘We’ve got about three dozen possible pieces. If it was on the bone it’d be a lot easier to spot; cows and pigs have a much higher meat to bone ratio, but look at this,’ she held up a pack labelled ‘DICED PORK’. ‘Could be anything. I’d expect human meat to be redder — based on the amount of myoglobin in the tissue — but if it’s been bled and frozen... We’ll need to defrost and DNA-test all of this before we’ll know for sure.’

Isobel pulled over another cardboard box, sliced through the plastic strapping, and started picking her way through the contents. ‘You can tell Inspector Insch it’ll take at least two weeks.’

Logan groaned. ‘He’s not going to like that.’

‘That’s not my problem, Sergeant.’

Oh, when she wanted someone to babysit her kid, or suffer through her endless digital camera slideshows of the sticky-fingered, dribbly little monster, he was ‘Logan’, but when she was pissed off at work he was ‘Sergeant.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s not my fault Insch had a go at you, OK? You think he’s bad tonight? I get him all bloody day—’ Clunk. Logan froze, eyes sweeping the shelves of frozen goods, hoping it wasn’t Alec with his camera. Things were bad enough without being caught complaining about Insch on national television. ‘Hello?’

‘Sergeant McRae?’ Mr Thompson peered around a stack of boxes marked ‘FISH FINGERS’. ‘I’ve found the dockets...’ he trailed off and stared at the pile of meat as Isobel added another chunk to the crate, the frozen pieces clattering against one another like ceramic tiles. ‘Is... is that all...?’

‘We won’t know till we test it.’ Logan held out his hand, and the rumpled man looked puzzled for a moment, then tried to shake it. ‘No,’ Logan took a step back, leaving him hanging, ‘the dockets?’