“Do you want me to drive for a bit?” he offered.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked in return.
He shrugged. “Fine. Awake and alert.” His gaze dropped to my hands, where they were holding my flaky, half-eaten croissant. “You’re the one with scratched-up hands.”
I was more than willing to let him drive for a while, and we swapped places. The cuts and bruises on my hands from the frantic digging I’d done in the chilled soil had started stinging as soon as the blood flow had returned, and I’d washed them off in the services bathroom, so they were doubly painful right now. Knowing that we’d found something worthwhile made it entirely worth it, though, and I didn’t regret my actions for a moment.
“What did you find, Steph?” I asked once he’d finished eating.
My stomach turned slightly at the thought of that wrapped bundle in the ground, but I was also desperate to know what the dogfighters had tried to hide. He was silent for long enough that I glanced over at him, finding him looking straight ahead out of the front windscreen.
“It was a dog. I took pictures.”
I swore quietly, not surprised but appalled all the same. “Could you tell how it’d died?”
“Something violent and horrible. It looked pretty awful.”
“Christ,” I muttered before falling silent.
“You should call LACS, let them know what’s happening.”
“I called Rashford while you were taking a kip. I’m sure she will have passed it on to them.”
“And these photos? What do you want to do with them?”
“We need to show them to a vet, someone with experience of the kinds of wounds that come from dogfighting.”
“LACS probably has a vet we could contact,” Stephen suggested, and I nodded.
“If the vet confirms it, this find will absolutely confirm that the farm was used for fighting and that animal abuse happened there.”
“And then?” Stephen prompted, and I sent him an exasperated look.
“Can’t we deal with that first? You may have had a nap, but I haven’t, and I could do with a shower, too.”
I’d scrubbed as much dirt off my hands as I could in the services, but I still felt like I could feel the grit under my nails, the wet soaked into my knees, and I wanted it off.
“Okay, okay. I’m just thinking of the long-run, that’s all.”
I sighed. “In the long run? I need to meet Phil or Matt again and get myself invited to a fight. We need it filmed somehow, preferably without me getting exposed as a snitch, with the whole damn lot of them implicated in the process. That’s the end goal. That’ll be real justice for Snell.”
Stephen nodded, staying quiet for a pause as he focused on the driving. We weren’t far from Hewford now, and the rain had started up again, steadily persistent.
“Do you want to go and visit him?”
I glanced over at him in surprise. We weren’t too far from the hospital, and there was no tearing hurry to be back at the station, though we couldn’t waste time either, of course.
“Aye, why not? That’d be nice.”
We stopped at a petrol station to fill up the car and grab some fresh food from the shop. I knew first-hand how dull hospital food could be, though it’d improved marginally in recent years, so I imagined Freddie wouldn’t mind us bringing him a few things.
We’d stop by to see how he was getting on before we returned to Hewford and carried on with the case. I was both looking forward to and dreading seeing the pictures that Stephen had captured on his phone, though I knew it must have been worse for him. He’d been the one to see the dead dog for himself, unwrapping the bloody cloth from around the body and then reburying it.
I only hoped that the dog’s death wouldn’t be in vain, that the evidence Stephen and I had gathered today would help with building the dogfighters’ coffins, even if we couldn’t quite nail them shut yet. We had a great deal of work left to do yet, but this felt like a crucial step in the right direction.
Twenty-One
It was Sunday night, nearly a whole week since Stephen and I had looked around that farm and nearly got ourselves caught, and I’d been champing at the bit to get something done with the evidence we’d found. A vet from LACS had confirmed what we all knew, that the injuries on the dog looked to have been inflicted during a dogfighting match and fairly recently too. LACS had been planning to move in on the farm undetected during the night and take the dog away, but people coming and going on the farm had hampered them. They still didn’t want to bust the place wide open, so they were biding their time.
That’d left Stephen and I twiddling our thumbs or dealing with unrelated cases since York was never short on the unfortunately ten-a-penny brawls and petty thefts, even if it was much better than some places. Still, getting the text from Phil offering to go out for another drink had been exactly what we needed to get the ball rolling again, and I’d jumped on it.
“First round’s on me for carting me home last time,” Phil laughed as he climbed into my car at around nine o’clock, shivering in his too-thin coat.
“I’ll take you up on that,” I agreed easily, twisting the heating dials up before I set off.
I’d offered to pick him up on the way to another night of drinking at the pub, though I’d keep to the nonalcoholic beer as much as I could. If I got challenged on it, I had a story planned about some meds I was on that meant I couldn’t drink. I wasn’t honestly a big drinker even when I wasn’t trying to keep myself alert on a job, but the peer pressure to get drunk was real and persistent, though it had lessened a little as I got older.
I was wearing a wire again and hoping that Phil would open up to me further. I expected that I’d have to wait until he was completely drunk and I was driving him home, so I braced myself for a long, boring night of pretending to be enjoying myself around a bunch of drunk blokes that I didn’t really know. I’d tried to persuade Phil that it’d be nicer if just me and him had a drink together, but he was determined that I became friends with ‘the guys’.
To my surprise, Phil started opening up on the drive over without me needing to prompt him much at all. It might’ve had something to do with the pre-drinks I could already smell on his breath, or just that he was starting to trust me more.
“I didn’t blab my mouth off too much last time, did I?” he wanted to know, playing for casual.
“Nah. We just talked about my dad a bit and your garage,” I said honestly, not sure how much he remembered.
“Yeah… you were kinda interested actually, right?”
I tensed. “Kind of interested in what?” I said, uneasy but trying to hide it.
Did he remember my too-direct questions and was now angling to know why I’d pushed him so hard to talk. I’d thought he’d been drunk enough to forget, but maybe I’d misjudged. It had been me who’d offered to ferry him over to the pub, but I wondered whether he’d only agreed because he wanted to grill me on the way over.
But my fears turned out to be unfounded when he laughed, telling me, “Don’t look so alarmed, Dee. I know you want in on the garage, yeah? I mean, anyone would. It’s going places, baby!”
I laughed like he wanted me to and tried to get my expression under control. Usually, I was better at keeping my feelings off my face, but Phil had known me as a lad, and he was better than the average Joe at figuring out what I was thinking, even when I tried to hide it.
“Aye, I guess I do want in,” I conceded, sending him a sideways look.
“I knew you did,” he said, looking pleased with himself. That was a much better reaction than him being suspicious of me, so my shoulders relaxed slightly.
“So, what do I need to do?” I asked when he didn’t say more.
“I’ve been working on it, my man,” he said, tapping the side of his nose. “This is private, mind, so don’t spread it around.” He glanced at me for confirmation, and I nodded hastily. “We had a wee setback not too long ago, so we’re scouting out a new place. Date
to be decided, you know how it is.”
Did Phil think I’d been to a dogfight before? I couldn’t be sure. I made a neutral noise of acknowledgement and was glad that I was driving because it gave me an excuse to keep my head turned away from him, and my attention focused on the road. Of course, I could’ve missed some clue or telling expression on his face for the same reason, but it was necessary.
“Let me know when it’s up and going again, yeah? I saw my dad’s stuff, y’know, and I want to be a part of it,” I lied.
I needed to be certain that Phil really was talking about the dogfighting and that I wasn’t misinterpreting the vague language he was using, and mentioning my dad’s dogfighting magazines seemed the best way to do that.
On the spur of the moment, I added, “I know I wasn’t that close to my dad towards the end, but…” I trailed off, letting Phil fill the blanks because I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Let Phil think that I felt guilty for not being closer to him or that I regretted not following in my dad’s footsteps when I was younger. I didn’t regret it for a moment, but that was a part of my new self that I couldn’t afford to show Phil nor share with him.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I know,” he said, sending me a bright grin.
“I appreciate it, Phil,” I told him genuinely. He chuckled at that.
“You’ve always been so ruddy serious. Nah, I appreciate it, Dee. I waved your dad’s name around a bit to get us in, and they’re all wanting to meet his boy. Yer going to be a celebrity.” He smirked at me, clearly thinking that this was brilliant news.
“Oh geez,” I managed to say whilst trying to keep myself calm.
“I know you’re not a big one for attention, like, but you wanted in, right? And they’ll forget about us as soon as the dogs are out and about.”
I’d managed to calm myself, and my smile began more real, though sharp-edged, the moment he mentioned the dogs. That was the first time he’d said it directly, and I hoped to hell that the wire had caught it. Now my mission was to get him to speak even more plainly about what happened at these fights and pump him for as much information as he was willing to give up.
The car ride over was rewarding enough that the several hours of drinking that followed didn’t seem quite so bad, though I was still bored out of my mind and playing Sudoku puzzles on my phone by the end of the night. I’d paid attention to their talk at the start, but as the lads got drunker, their conversation made less sense, and there was no reason for me to listen in.
I gave Phil his lift home as I’d promised, even though he was in an even worse state than last time. He threw up in the bushes of the pub’s car park and then again into the sick bag I’d shoved into his hands. Then he passed out completely and wouldn’t rouse even as I practically carried him inside. I put him on his side on the couch, finding a large bowl and putting it on the floor beside him in case he needed to be sick again. I was slightly concerned about leaving him when he was quite so drunk, and I got as far as putting my shoes on to go before resigning myself to camping over for the night to make sure he was okay.
I set an alarm to go off every hour so I could check on him before I collapsed onto the second couch, my tiredness catching up with me almost immediately. It was a long, disturbed night, but Phil came out of it alive and kicking the next morning, so I counted it a success. He looked and smelled like hell and threw up twice more after he woke up.
“Y’didn’t have t’stay over,” he mumbled, sick bowl in his lap and his face pale.
“I know. You looked pretty rough though, I didn’t want to just leave you,” I said.
It probably didn’t make me the best person that it’d occurred to me last night that I needed Phil to get into the fight, and I’d be scuppered without him, but I thought I could confidently say that it hadn’t been the reason I’d stayed. I really did believe that it was a police officer’s duty to serve and protect, and criminal or not, Phil had needed someone to keep an eye on him last night, and no one else had been offering.
“Thanks, Dee. You’re a real mate,” he croaked before retching again.
He shooed me off not long later, and I was happy enough to leave him alone to work off his hangover and, hopefully, have a shower too. The cold air outside smelled particularly good after the acrid smell of Phil’s body odour and the beer he’d probably splashed down himself at some point last night.
I stretched my hands up as I reached my car, my back clicking in painful protest at sleeping on Phil’s lumpy faux-leather sofa, which had been both sticky and too short for my lanky frame. I had a crick in my neck too, which stubbornly refused to budge, even as I rolled and massaged it on the way over to Hewford. I could do with a run later since I’d missed having one yesterday because of getting together with Phil, though I at least had the consolation that something profoundly useful had come out of the whole thing.
Phil had all but promised to take me to a dogfight within the next few weeks, and I was both worried and buzzing about it at the same time. This was what we’d been hoping for, and yet it was also a huge risk for me, for the dogs, and for LACS and everyone else involved. If this went wrong, it could set LACS back a long way with trying to catch these people after the disaster with Freddie, and the dogs might not have that long. We’d already been too late for the poor dog that Stephen and I had found buried behind the barn.
What I needed was a clear plan, and for that, I needed to get Stephen and Rashford on board with me going in there. I wasn’t trained to infiltrate dangerous groups of criminals like Freddie had been, and yet with all his experience, he’d still been caught out and badly hurt. I still didn’t know how exactly his cover had been blown, which didn’t help either. Right now, though, I was the best option available, and I only had to think of the pictures on Stephen’s phone to know that I was doing the right thing.
Stephen seemed quieter than usual when he arrived at Hewford, and I gave him some space, unsure whether his duller mood was due to family stuff or because of the case and me.
“I really don’t want you doing this, mate,” he admitted over coffee. “I was telling Annie about it last night, not the details obviously but just that you’d be in a lot of danger, and she’s worried too.”
I was glad he was talking about it to his wife, but I really didn’t want more people concerned about me.
“I can handle myself, Steph. I’ll be careful. I’m walking in there with Phil, not on my own, and nothing bad’s going to happen, okay?”
His expression was strained. “You do remember that you’ve been on the TV in press conferences? That was local to York, and they’re probably all pretty local too. Any one of those thugs could recognise you at any time.”
“Aye, I know,” I said tightly.
“The superintendent and Ross both said they probably wouldn’t be able to get you out if something goes wrong. It’ll be-”
“I know,” I said again, slightly harder. “I’m going in there, and I’ll do my best. I was on TV ages ago, and I didn’t do a lot of talking. It’s very unlikely that any of them will remember.”
“And if one of them is someone we’ve arrested or dealt with?”
“Then I guess I’m screwed,” I snapped.
We glared at each other for a second before Stephen deflated, backing down.
“I’m worried. I’ve seen what happened to Freddie, and I don’t want that happening to you.”
He looked so miserable, and I hated putting him through this. I knew that it was awful when someone else was in danger, and you couldn’t help them, but I really did have to do this.
“I need to try, Steph. You already know that I’m going to adjust my appearance a bit, and I’ll be really careful, I promise. If I don’t go in, other people are going to end up like Freddie, too, and I can’t stand by and watch that happen. Everything I’ve read on dogfighting suggests that it’s a gateway to more serious crime, like drugs and trafficking and God knows what else. We have to tackle it before it gets too bi
g.”
“I know,” he said finally, blowing out a breath. A moment later, he looked over at me and cracked a sad smile. “But why does it have to be you?”
I matched his pained smile. “Right place, right time. Or wrong place, wrong time, depending on how you see it.”
“Definitely the wrong place,” Stephen muttered before he gave a sigh and straightened up. “Alright, I’m done arguing. Clearly, you’re going to give this a shot with or without me, so obviously, you’re stuck with me.”
“Damn it. I’d really been hoping this’d be the thing to shake you.”
He grinned like I hoped he would and shook his head. “No way, man. You’ll have to try harder.”
“Aye? Like, drag you out running?”
“Oh yeah, that’d work. I’ll piss right off if you try that,” he laughed.
“Thought so,” I sighed before sending him a smile. I was glad that we were back to being easy with each other because I hated it when we were arguing.
“So tell me about this disguise you’re going to do, huh? Should I bring out my pink hair dye?”
“You haven’t got enough hair to dye,” I teased, reaching a hand up to scruff over his close-shorn head. He batted me away with a grumble.
“At least I can grow a beard,” he tossed back. “You’re not going to try for a moustache again, are you? You’ll be well-disguised as a pimply teenager.”
Ever since we’d both done Movember for charity the other year, he’d ribbed me mercilessly for being unable to grow much more than a scraggly sort of moustache. I hadn’t been with Sam at that point, so she hadn’t had to put up with any bristly kisses, but Stephen, to my chagrin, had shown her the pictures anyway, making her giggle.
“No, no wispy moustache,” I sighed, rolling my eyes at him.
“Buzzcut? Fake tattoos?”
“God, Steph, shut up. I’m not trying to look completely different. That’d make Phil suspicious, wouldn’t it? I’ll just get a haircut, style it a bit differently and maybe put on some glasses or something. I can claim that I usually wear contact lenses if Phil asks.”
Moving Target (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 6) Page 24
