Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

‘It’s OK,’ said Steel, ‘you can call him a cock-sucking arse-weasel. I won’t faint.’ Wink. ‘So come on then, how many people had access to this twenty years ago?’

‘This painting’s over a hundred and seventy-eight years old, Inspector. We have open days a couple of times a year: show members of the public around the hall, explain things to them, give them a bit of the history of the things we have here.’

‘So you’re saying it could have—’

‘And each trade has a big annual dinner dance. The members invite their friends and family, clients sometimes.’ He stared at the paintings. ‘We’ve had to cancel ours. No one wants to accept an invitation from the Fleshers with all these horrible things going on...’

Which wasn’t surprising. Logan pulled out his list of names from 1990. ‘You weren’t interviewed during the original investigation?’

‘No, my uncle died in seventy-four — I went back to Cupar for six months to help get everything in order, stayed for nineteen years. Didn’t come up again till ninety-three.’ He smiled. ‘Missed all the excitement.’

‘Do you recognize any of these names?’

Ewan produced a pair of half-moon glasses and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. Even then he had to hold the list at arm’s length, going through the names one by one. ‘Oh aye, he’s still here... so’s he... poor Charles took pancreatic cancer... this one’s moved to Australia to be with his grandkids... no idea — before my time... pneumonia... Alzheimer’s... you know, I haven’t seen Peter for ages. Think he’s in a nursing home now...’ and on it went. Ewan seemed to sag as he got to the end of the list. ‘Sorry. Seeing them all written down like this... death gets us all in the end...’

He took off his glasses and started down the corridor again. ‘Would you like to see the Dead Man’s Gallery?’

It was more like a passageway than a gallery — a long, thin space next to the main hall, lined with huge gilt frames containing dozens of little black and white photographs. ‘When I first joined,’ said Ewan, pointing at oldfashioned pictures of stiff, formal men with wild Victorian facial hail, ‘I’d show guests round here and we’d laugh at all the beardie-wierdies. Look at this one,’ it was a young man with huge sideburns and mutton chops that reached well past the collar of his starched shirt, ‘like something out of Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolf Man , isn’t he? It’s not till you start seeing the faces of people you know in here that it really hits you: these were men. They had hopes and dreams, just like you and me. Families who loved them. Wives and children who mourned...’

He led them down to another huge frame, this one with a tiny plaster coat of arms at the top: red background, curved knives. The frame was only half full and some of the photos were even in colour, fading away to that strange seventies orange tone. Wide lapels, brown suits, and more sideburns.

‘And these,’ said Ewan, ‘are our recently deceased members. There’s Charles, I was telling you about him. Simon, Craig, Thomas... This is John: he was in the second wave on D-Day. And that’s my old mentor Edward. Lovely man; orphan, grew up in a children’s home, came from nothing and ended up with three butcher’s shops and a house in Rubislaw Den. Couldn’t have kids of his own so they adopted a little girl from a broken home.’ He pointed at a man with a ludicrous comb-over. ‘Robert there took in a wee boy with polio. Jane and I had two girls of our own, but I never forgot Edward’s example. So we adopted our youngest, Ben. Abandoned on the steps of St Nicholas church the day after he was born. How could someone just throw away a life like that? Madness...’ Ewan stared at the photos in silence for a moment. Then went through them one by one: ‘Cancer, cancer, heart attack, pneumonia, cancer, Thomas had a stroke two weeks after his wife died; Edward and Sheila went in a car crash. Robert took an aneurism on Union Street.’

He tapped the glass. ‘One day I’ll be in there. And people will come in and laugh at my photo. I’ll be dead, but I’ll always be part of something. That’s important, isn’t it? Not to disappear into nothing...’

‘ Pierdolona kurwa fuck.’ Andrzej Jaskolski jabbed at the start button again. ‘Work jebany piece of shit!’ he kicked the metal wall, but the mill still wouldn’t start. Typical: the boilers go down for two days and now the pierdolone bone mill was broken too. ‘Go to UK,’ said his wife, ‘earn lots of money, come back and set up own clinic in Warsaw. Be rich man.’ Kurwa mac . Degree in Orthopaedic Therapy and he ends up working in stinking rendering plan in stinking abattoir in stinking arse end of nowhere Scottish backwater.

Another kick. ‘Start, dirty bitch fuck!’

One more kick and the machine rumbled into life, the huge steel teeth at the bottom of the trough grinding through bones and off-cuts and fat.

Only no chopped up bones fell into the next hopper.

Ja pierdole!

He grabbed the long wooden pole that leant against the wall — still not laughing at the kurwo foreman’s joke — and jabbed at the mass of bones.

Poke, jab, poke. A sudden clunk , and the pile slumped. Grinding noise. Bone and gristle fragments chugged into the next hopper, ready to be torn up into even smaller pieces.

Andrzej Jaskolski turned to put the pole back where he’d got it. Tonight he’d go into town with other Polish workers from abattoir. Drink. Maybe dance. Maybe find nice woman with own flat and not go back to jebanego bed and breakfast with no hot water and stains on ceiling and bed made of concrete.

He froze, one hand on the pole, then turned back to the sinking mass of cattle bones. Sweat breaking out on his forehead. Hoping his eyes were playing tricks on him...

They weren’t.

‘ O kurwa jebana mac ...’

Logan had never seen an abattoir before. He’d been expecting a wooden building with blood-smeared concrete and wailing cattle, but from the outside, Alaba Farm Fresh Meats looked more like a warehouse. A big, breezeblock building with a green metal roof and a two-storey block of offices, all hidden behind a thick, twelve-foot-high leylandii hedge. From the street you’d have no idea what was going on inside — if it wasn’t for the smell.

The company sign tried to make everything look jolly and approachable: ‘FARM TO PLATE, SCOTCH MEAT IS GREAT!’ and a happy cartoon pig, wearing a butcher’s outfit and holding a cleaver.

Logan marched past the thing, across the car park, and up to the security bunker. An articulated lorry was stopped at the barricade, its headlights glowing in the thin, cold drizzle, sheep staring out from the four-storey trailer as the driver argued with one of the guards.

‘What the hell am I supposed to do with all these bloody sheep?’

‘It’s no’ ma fault, is it? Police say naebiddy gets in or oot till they’ve finished.’

Logan hurried inside. Security monitors dominated one wall, showing white oversuited figures picking their way through the abattoir and its outbuildings. Three uniformed PCs sat going through the old tapes, wreathed in the comforting steam of hot coffee. Logan helped himself to a mug, then stood with his backside against the radiator, watching them work. ‘Anything?’

One of the PCs shrugged. ‘Not yet.’

When his bum had defrosted, Logan topped up his coffee, poured one for Steel, and headed out into the abattoir grounds.

Everything was going on round the back, the harsh white glare of the IB’s spotlights cutting through the cold November night.

He struggled into yet another SOC oversuit and followed a line of blue-and-white POLICE tape into a three-storey, enclosed metal structure. The smell was much worse here: raw meat and roasting animal fat, like a lamb chop left under the grill for too long. The air felt... greasy with a sour edge to it that made his stomach churn.