Roz Watkins - Cut to the Bone

Anna was providing a lot of detail in her descriptions. That could be normal. She might have just been a very helpful person, a kind-of human Lassie dog. Or not. It was too early to tell.

‘The Category 2 waste …’ I said. ‘Would that have included any meat waste from yesterday or last night?’ Our assumption was that Violet was alive, but I wanted to know what had happened to those waste products.

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘Yes, it would. And from this morning. It’s all been taken away. It goes to be rendered.’

‘Do you have details of the company that takes it?’ I asked.

She froze a moment. ‘Why would … Oh, okay.’ She reached into a drawer, fished out an invoice and passed it over. If she’d worked out what this could mean, she kept it to herself.

I turned to Jai. ‘Do you mind calling them now? And checking on the searches.’

Jai took the paper and left the room.

When I turned back to Anna, her fists were clenched tight in her lap, knuckles shining white.

‘Violet was on a night shift?’ I said.

Anna nodded rapidly. ‘Ten till two thirty. Cleaning. She has a summer job here.’

‘Why did she come to work in an abattoir?’

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? When I found out who she was, I was baffled. I did ask her and she was rather vague. I can’t say for sure, but I got the impression she wanted to come to Gritton for some other reason, and this job was an excuse.’

‘Okay, thank you. And had she worked her shift last night? Could you tell this morning if the cleaning had been done?’

Anna frowned. ‘I’m not sure … We have such high standards here, it’s not as if she was mopping up blood – it’s more of an extra clean. We have what we call a “clean side” and a “dirty side”. She was on the clean side – meat only, no live animals – which is why it’s so strange that her watch turned up near the pig pen on the dirty side. She’s been given specific instructions not to go on the dirty side when she’s cleaning.’

‘Okay. Could you have another look – the guys will tell you where you can go. See if there’s anything to suggest she did or didn’t clean up.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Is there any CCTV other than the broken one? Any camera footage that would show if anyone else was here last night.’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. Not on site.’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘At home. But Esther was with me. She doesn’t live with me, but she stayed over. She can confirm I was with her.’

‘Violet lodges with Esther?’

‘Yes. Yes, she does. I helped that girl a lot, even letting her live with my girlfriend.’ Was that a hint of bitterness in her tone?

‘Did Violet not appreciate that help?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, I’m not saying she didn’t appreciate it.’ A somewhat tight-lipped response.

‘Do you get along with Violet?’

Anna swallowed. ‘She’s all right, I suppose. A good employee generally.’

‘Generally but not totally?’

Anna’s eyes hardened briefly. A flash of steel. ‘Just a turn of phrase. She’s fine.’

I paused to write in my notebook. Anna kept her face expressionless. She clearly didn’t like Violet. Could be relevant. Could be nothing. I spent half my life wanting to throttle my colleague Craig and I hadn’t murdered him yet.

‘How long has Violet been working here?’ I asked.

‘About a month. I can’t—’ Anna swung her gaze around the room as if Violet might be hiding in a corner. ‘Let me ring Esther again. Violet’s probably home by now.’

‘Okay, you do that,’ I said.

Anna fished out her mobile and dialled. The phone must have been picked straight up at the other end. ‘Is she back?’ Anna’s voice was loud and sharp.

I couldn’t hear the answer but Anna’s face dropped. She spoke into the phone. ‘No, nothing.’ There was a muffled reply, the words audible though my brain could make no sense of them, and then Anna said, ‘Oh, come on, Esther, you don’t believe that rubbish—’

Anna frowned at the woman’s response and ended the call with a brisk, ‘Okay, bye.’

‘No sign of her?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Okay. And what rubbish does Esther not believe?’

Anna shook her head. ‘It’s nothing. What else do you need to know?’

My brain got there in the end with the words I’d heard. ‘Did she say something about a pale child?’

Anna shifted papers around her desk before looking up and staring straight at me. ‘Not to cast aspersions on the people in this village, but they don’t get out enough. The Pale Child thing is all nonsense.’

‘Who is this Pale Child?’ I asked.

Anna gave me a strange look. Like somebody remembering a scene from their distant childhood. When she spoke, her voice was cracked, like sun-scorched earth. ‘As I said, it’s not real. Are we done here? Because I have things I need to be getting on with. It’s bad enough you people saying I can’t kill animals today, but if I don’t make a few phone calls soon, it’ll be too late to cancel, and they’ll be turning up here. I suspect you don’t need a bunch of condemned pigs marauding around the place.’ She wasn’t in Lassie-dog mode any more.

‘You make your phone calls,’ I said. ‘We’ll need to take a formal statement from you later. But first, could you tell me who else could have got into the abattoir last night.’

‘My brother, Gary, who you just met, has keys. He’s outside looking for Violet. And Daniel Twigg – the one who over-fed the pigs earlier.’

‘You said he was unwell, didn’t you? What’s the matter with him?’

‘Said he felt sick.’

‘Okay, we’ll talk to him. And before we go, even if it is nonsense, what’s the story about this Pale Child?’

Anna sighed. ‘It’s nothing. Just idiot-talk from the people in the village. It’s not relevant.’

‘Fine. Tell me anyway.’

‘People see her in the woods around the village. A girl dressed in white, old-fashioned clothes. Supposedly, if she sees your face, you’re going to die.’ She lowered her gaze. ‘Which is clearly not true.’

‘So she’s a child who lives in the village?’

‘She’s not a real child. The whole Pale Child thing is a myth. I don’t know why Esther even brought it up.’

‘Did Violet see this Pale Child?’

‘Of course not. I don’t know why you’re even asking about this.’

I wrote ‘Pale Child’ in my notebook and underlined it twice, then looked up and said, ‘Okay, tell me about the threats you mentioned earlier.’

Anna’s leg jiggled up and down before she stilled it with a hand. ‘You obviously know who Violet is. Her videos?’

‘I know she’s famous for videoing herself cooking meat-based products in a bikini.’

Anna sighed. ‘Maybe we used her, you could say.’ She fiddled with a loose thread on her vest-top. ‘I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while, to debate this stuff. Meat, the environment, welfare, etc. Violet helped. She got us attention. I never knew it could be … dangerous.’

‘Okay, you’d better tell me from the beginning.’

‘It’s all so polarised now, like everything. I wanted to have an intelligent discussion. We set the website up – The Great Meat Debate – and put videos and posts on it. Discussions about the ethics of meat, and about how we’d designed the abattoir. Gary does stupid strength challenges with vegans. Lifting vans and ripping up books or whatever. I mean, that wasn’t part of the intelligent debate, but people love that kind of thing. As for Violet … well, Violet’s just Violet, and she brought us most of our visitors.’

‘You’ve had threats?’

‘Yes. I never expected that to happen. It’s not like we’re doing anything bad, but we attracted a load of attention. You know what it’s like – sometimes the more ethical meat producers come in for more vitriol. As if it’s almost worse to be nice to the animals before you kill them. People can’t seem to handle that. Like that farmer who let kids meet the turkeys at Christmas. It’s irrational, but there it is. We get a lot of haters. Especially a group called the Animal Vigilantes. Do you know them?’