Paul Finch - Stolen

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Bloody perfect. All this needs bagging and tagging, Tessa.’

Payne nodded, at which point they were distracted by the sound of more canine whining. The outhouse had its own outer door – again just a frame with no actual door in it. On the other side they found an enclosed yard containing a set of weighing scales, a treadmill and a large glass tank, very grimy and filled to the brim with water so filthy and green that it was almost opaque. There was also a row of grillwork cages with crudely built kennels attached. Each was occupied by a dog, but these were animals of a different ilk to those they’d seen so far. They were highly subdued, lying still with ears flat, each one watching the humans beyond their cages with fearful intensity.

And it was clear why.

They were brutally scarred, in many cases so bitten and ragged that the fur was entirely missing from their faces. Several had lost so much flesh from their jowls that their teeth were exposed. At least a couple were missing an eye, the empty sockets crudely sutured shut. Lucy saw ears hanging in ribbons, paws chewed into lame, leathery stumps. The reason for that was evident in their breeds, for these were mostly mongrels, but those that weren’t were recognisable as Labradors, spaniels and retrievers, suburban pets rather than fighting-dogs.

‘Bait,’ Lucy observed as she walked along the cages.

‘Looks like this is where all the abductees we’ve been hearing about have finished up,’ Payne said, following.

‘Maybe.’

‘No sign of the black van yet, though.’

‘We need to keep looking.’

To Lucy’s mind, the existence of ‘bait dogs’ was one of the most sickening aspects of the whole dog-fighting disgrace. That these trusting, innocent creatures could be thrown into the pit repeatedly as part of a callous training regime for the fighting-dogs, where they’d be attacked mercilessly, again and again, by savage beasts that wanted nothing more than to senselessly kill anything they were faced with, didn’t bear thinking about. But that such a thing could happen to one-time pets, allegedly stolen from loving homes by this mysterious black van that had been reported several times when an animal had vanished, was somehow even more horrible.

‘We need the vets again,’ Lucy said, to which the younger detective nodded and hurried away.

‘At least you’re not going to need them in here,’ a voice said.

She glanced around, and saw Malcolm Peabody leaning out through the entrance to an ugly breezeblock building with no glass in its windows and a sagging tarpaper roof. He’d removed his ballistics helmet and now carried it under one arm. His hair was damp and spiky, his freckled features greased with sweat. Normally an affable young bloke with a great enthusiasm for the job, his expression was grim and angry, his pallor waxen.

Deeply apprehensive, Lucy followed him inside.

Torchlight revealed that it was a basic shell of a room with bare walls and a rugged concrete floor. It was also stained with the blood of ages and strewn with dog carcasses. There were at least ten of them, all relatively recent; Lucy could tell that because flies buzzed everywhere, and a fetid odour thickened the air. She surveyed the heap of twisted forms with what a stranger might have called indifference, but in truth was cold professionalism. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect her, it was simply that, twelve years in, Lucy was a veteran of this kind of ghastliness, and she knew that to get emotional would only cloud her judgement.

Peabody, a relative newbie, was less in control.

‘These are obviously the ones they couldn’t use any more,’ he said, looking nauseous as he indicated a heavy mallet hanging from a nail by a leather strap. ‘And this is how they put them out of their misery.’

‘Don’t touch it,’ Lucy replied. ‘Don’t touch anything. Not till we’ve had Photographic in here.’

They stepped back outside into the fresher air, and Lucy indicated to one of the other uniforms to come and stand by the door. Walking back through the barn, they came to the farmyard where the prisoners were lined up, their details and the details of the officers who’d detained them being tabulated by Sergeant Frobisher to ensure there’d be no confusion back at Custody. One by one, the prisoner transports were reversing into place, their back doors swinging along with the cage doors inside.

‘Your cards are fucking marked!’ the hefty figure of Mandy Mahoney squawked as two armoured policewomen frogmarched her to a waiting police car. As the only female detainee, she would travel separately from the others. ‘All you pigs … you’re all fucking marked!’

Not far behind her, the even more ponderous and dishevelled shape of Les Mahoney was also manhandled forward. He stank of sweat, and when he grinned at Lucy, showed a full set of rotten teeth.

‘Sorry to disrupt your evening’s entertainment, Mr Mahoney,’ she said.

His grin never faltered. ‘Fuck you, you slip of a tart.’ Hawking a green one, he spat it on the floor at her feet. ‘And tell your fucking clodhopping arse-bandit mates not to make too much of a mess, or I’ll sue the fucking lot of you.’

‘Some chance,’ Peabody retorted. ‘You’re going to jail, pal.’

‘Yeah?’ Mahoney guffawed. ‘Good. I could use a five-month holiday … you spotty-faced lump of dogshit.’

Peabody lurched forward, but Lucy physically restrained him.

‘Get him out of my sight,’ she said.

Mahoney laughed loudly and brashly as he was led away.

Lucy shook her head. ‘Last of the old-school charmers, eh?’

Peabody scowled. ‘It’s right what he said though. We’ll be lucky if he gets any more than a slapped wrist for this. We should drive the bastard around a corner somewhere and smack the living crap out of him … just in case he gets a free ride later.’

Lucy watched as they assisted the cuffed Mahoney into one of the vans. ‘What’ve I told you about getting too involved, Malcolm? You won’t go the distance if you let this job screw with your head. Those things back there … they’re just animals.’ She patted his cheek before walking away. ‘Wait till you see it done to humans.’

Though she’d worn a uniform for the first decade of her career, Lucy Clayburn had now been a detective constable for two years, but in all that time she had only ever worked her home patch of Crowley, Greater Manchester Police’s legendary November Division.

The one-time industrial town – though these days it was more a post-industrial wasteland – had an infamous reputation for villainy, though it probably wasn’t any more deserved than those bad reps attached to other northern English cities where full employment was a thing of the past and drugs and alcohol had flowed in to fill the gap.

The problem with being a police officer – anywhere really, not just in a place like Crowley – was that you knew what went on behind the sometimes paper-thin façade of the local community. So she wasn’t entirely surprised that night of Wednesday, September 12, to look down the list of prisoners waiting in the traps at Robber’s Row police station, November Division’s HQ, and see that they included professional men with sedate family backgrounds: a senior civil servant, a local journalist, an estate agent, even a bank manager. There were louts and scallies among them too, all the usual suspects; but respectability was a keyword where several were concerned, or superficial respectability at least. Maybe, to an extent, she should have anticipated this, because dog-fighting wouldn’t have existed at all, even as an illegal sport, without the hefty cashflow it generated. It was only ever about gambling, and if you didn’t have the readies for that, you couldn’t participate.