Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

Steel was at the top of the stairs, hands jammed deep into her pockets, her face creased in disgust. ‘What took you so long?’

‘You’re welcome.’ He handed over the extra mug of coffee.

‘This got sugar in it?’

‘What do you think?’ Logan stepped round the inspector, peering over the guard rail at a mass of bones, hooves and offal. There were two IB technicians in there, passing chunks out to a third who carried them over to a collapsible table, where Isobel scrutinized them.

‘Bloody stinks in here...’ Steel wrapped her hands around her mug. ‘Come on then, door-to-doors?’

Logan pointed towards the back wall of the bone mill. ‘All the houses on that side are derelict — apparently no one wants buy a three-bedroom semi downwind of an abattoir.’

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Uniform are going through the rest. Nothing so far.’

‘Yeah, well, the pretty and talented DCS Bain is interviewing the workforce as we speak. So that’ll be a bloody disaster.’ The inspector sipped her coffee, and grimaced. ‘This taste funny to you?’

‘It was fine in the security bunker...’ but Steel was right, out here it had developed an unpleasant flavour of rancid lard.

‘Right,’ she leant on the guard rail, watching as Isobel chucked a long bone into a wheelbarrow and waved for the next sample, ‘half six — the abattoir’s running double shifts to catch up, ‘cos they’ve had an equipment failure — and some poor sod’s clearing out the bone cruncher. Turns out he’s an orthopaedic thingy back in Poland, so when he sees a human thighbone poking out of the pile he hits the emergency stop and refuses to budge till they call the police.’ She shook her head. ‘Weird, eh? Guy goes to medical school and ends up over here,’ cos he can make more money working in an abattoir shovelling bones than he can doctoring back home.’

‘You question him?’

Steel turned. ‘No, I took his word for it when he said he’d no’ hacked anyone up. Looked like an honest bloke...’ she slapped Logan on the arm. ‘Course I bloody questioned him.’

Isobel straightened up from her table and passed a triangle of bone to her assistant. ‘Scapula.’ It went into a blue plastic evidence box.

Steel pointed at the growing pile of human remains. ‘It’s Tom Stephen, they found his head... you want to see?’

‘Excuse me?’ A man in white Wellington boots, baggy plastic trousers, overcoat, hairnet and hardhat had appeared on the walkway behind them. ‘Do you think this is going to be finished tonight? Only we’ve got a backlog—’

‘How’d you get up here?’

He pointed over his shoulder. ‘Access door from the Den of Dung — where we rinse out the intestines and stomachs...’ He dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘Look, can’t you just empty this lot out and take it with you?’

‘Excuse me a moment, sir,’ Steel leant on the guardrail and shouted down at someone on the ground. ‘I told you to seal the bloody entrances! That means all the entrances, no’ just the ones you can be arsed with!’

She turned back to the gentleman. ‘Sorry about that. Now if you don’t mind: this’ll go a lot faster if you let us get on with out jobs.’

‘But—’

‘This is the way it works. We have to go through each and every chunk of crap in that hopper. Then we’re going to examine every bit of meat in the place. And until we’ve done that, you’re no’ hacking up anything else. Comprende?’

‘But I’ve got orders to fulfil! We have to—’

‘Oh, is this no’ a good time for you? You should have said! Tell you what, why don’t we just forget all about the human remains we found in your rendering plant—’

‘Protein processing. We don’t call it “rendering” anymore, on account of—’

‘I don’t care! You’re shut down till I tell you different!’ And with that she stomped off. It would have been an impressive exit, if she hadn’t stopped halfway down the stairs to haul her SOC oversuit out from the crack of her backside.

The man in the white outfit watched her go. ‘But we’ve got a backlog...’

Logan patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m afraid she’s right: we can’t risk any more human meat getting into the food chain.’ He looked up at the company name, written along the side of the abattoir building in three-foot-high lettering. ‘It’s an unusual way to spell Alba.’

‘The Md’s idea: he got fed up having to explain how to pronounce it all the time.’

‘Look on the bright side, it...’ Logan stopped and frowned. ‘Do you supply wholesalers? Butchers, cash and carrys, things like that?’

‘Couple of supermarket chains too. We’re very proud of our traditional—’

He was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. ‘I’m going to need a list of your customers.’

DI Steel was slumped in one of the boardroom chairs, hands over her face, listening as Logan told her the bad news. Again. He waited for her to go off on one, rant and swear, try to pin the blame on someone else. But instead she let her head fall back, stared at the ceiling, and said, ‘Oh... sodding hell.’

The boardroom was lined with posters of steaks, roasts, things on skewers, mince, chops, and those charts telling you which cut comes from which part of which animal. Like a preschool puzzle in meat.

She scrubbed her hands across her face, sighed, then asked Logan if he was sure.

‘Positive. The abattoir supplies Thompson’s Cash and Carry, and McFarlane’s butcher shop.’

‘Oh, we are so screwed!’

Midnight. Logan stopped on the damp concrete walkway and yawned, caught in the glare of a security spotlight. Drizzle made his SOC suit shine. The bone mill had been cleared out, the abattoir’s butchery and packaging areas searched and sealed off, and all the senior officers had buggered off to their beds. Bastards.

Logan stretched, groaned, and yawned again. Three disembodied sheep heads lay on the ground beside an empty skip, their creamy wool tinged with dark red. He knew how they felt.

The shed where they aged the beef and lamb stood off to one side — a large refrigerated building full of vacuum-packed meat and shivering police officers. They’d been at it for four hours, and still didn’t know if they’d found anything or not.

‘Like pulling teeth.’ The Police Search Advisor in charge of the shed team cupped his latex-gloved hands and blew into them. ‘I mean, look at it...’ he indicated the rows of shelving, the green trays full of meat — dark purple in the fluorescent lighting — the black plastic latticework of the big storage bins. ‘There’s tons of the bloody stuff in here and it all looks the same to me.’

It was Thompson’s Cash and Carry all over again, only on a much larger scale.

The POLSA turned and nodded at Doc Fraser. The old pathologist was huddled in a vast tartan blanket, examining shiny packages of dark meat. ‘Poor sod’s pushing sixty: should be sat on his backside drinking cocoa and fantasising about Doris Day in a bath full of jam, not buggering about in a bloody big fridge.’

‘You better tell everyone to take a break in...’ Logan checked his watch. ‘What, twenty minutes? Don’t want them keeling over with hypothermia.’

‘Any chance of a cuppa, or something?’

‘They’re opening the abattoir canteen for us — do everyone a hot meal, something with chips. It’s—’

‘Ah, no offence, like, but they sell human meat here. I’m no’ eating anything .’

Logan had to admit that he had a point.

The second search team were working their way through the skin shed — four constables in grimy SOC suits — smeared with dirty-pink salt and globbets of fat — peeling the cattle skins from their piles one at a time, making sure nothing looked as if it belonged on a human body.