He always assumed it was meant as a wry dig at his contempt for sentimentality and a counterpoint to the brutality of the case he was working on at the time – that of a rhubarb-picking Pole who had put his slicing knife through the throat of a colleague before going home and doing the same to his wife and child. The press had erroneously dubbed him the Rhubarb Killer and though for James Brindle there was no case at all the sight of the wife and especially the child – a girl – punctured like a mongrel puppy’s cheap rubber toy had stayed with him for a long time. The Pole got life and survived three years in Monster Mansion before some of the younger lads got to him with the boiling sugar-water and then with an HMP shiv. The Rhubarb Killer never saw Katowice again.
Brindle finds himself inadvertently looking at the photo of the kitten in the wellington boot quite often.
From his desk in the corner of Cold Storage Brindle can see across the rooftops of the adjacent warehouses. The way the early spring sun beams down and reflects on their corrugated roofs makes them look like a series of rippling swimming pools. Rectangular pools filled with mercury. Sometimes he imagines stepping into one of those imaginary bodies of water and never resurfacing.
The new detective culture now is one of sparseness and minimalism. Lots of light and clean straight lines. Open-plan spaces to encourage communication and quickness of mind.
Cold Storage as it is dubbed is discreetly tucked away in a vast business park. It is not like other police departments. This is no red-brick post-war village building or vast municipal behemoth. It is at the vanguard of policing and its anonymity and obscure positioning is wholly deliberate; its exterior reveals nothing about the building’s contents. The architecture is vehemently twenty-first century – a projection of ideals manifested in tinted windows and syphonic drainage and a temperature-controlled climate plus well-maintained common green spaces. A manmade lake has been dug in to provide a tranquil ambience and there is enough parking to ensure that no worker need stray more than ten paces from the designated building’s entrance to ensure maximum productivity. There is a nearby gymnasium whose interior Brindle has never seen though from the outside he has watched the faceless shadows of bodies on treadmills flattened beneath opaque glass and ghostlike forms lunging and shadow-boxing. Apparitions fighting themselves.
The adjoining organisations are similarly enigmatic and low-key. Here companies called Plexus and Remit and Forward do business.
The correctness and uniformity of his everyday surroundings should appeal to Brindle. Sparse surfaces should be soothing to him; should put him at ease. Yet somehow for reasons he has not yet determined it does not.
Increasingly nothing does.
THAT FIRST DAY after his transfer James Brindle made sure he took a corner desk which he has now surreptitiously positioned in such a way that the towers of empty box-files form a sort of wall to keep his colleagues out. He does not want to encourage undue interaction. That might be the Cold Storage way but it is not his way.
Brindle’s drawers are full of print-outs. He likes to file copies of all correspondence and keep notes on everything. Everything. He files and he stores and he cross-references continuously. He has a complex system that involves colour codes and marker pens. Every case every conversation. Documented. Every scrap every suspicion every statement. Recorded. Every journey every receipt. Every crumb consumed. Secretly he calls them his Archives of Everything.
And they call the emerging department Cold Storage because this is where the bodies go. Or the memories of them anyway. Those trapped in that silent vortex somewhere between murder and justice. Here their bodies have been replaced by – or reduced to – open files. Missing persons. They are piles of paper now; they are the odd photograph or photocopied bank statement. They are notable by their absence. They are gaps in the lives of those living left behind.
Cold Storage for cold cases. These are the people who have upped and left under suspicious circumstances. Those whose trails are scant. The gone.
Sometimes there are bodies but only the bloodiest ones. And when there are the Cold Storage detectives retrace the steps from death back into life. They walk backwards from tragedy through the strange lives of these people. They start at the final breath and end at their birth and somewhere along the way they find out where it all went wrong.
They are at the centre of that great unseen grid of national policing information and in years to come history will view Cold Storage’s creation as a leap forward in information-gathering and modern British policing.
This is what they are told anyway.
He keeps his work-surface spotless. Just because the world exists in a state of chaos it does not mean that he has to. A small amount of order imposed is the best that he can strive for – that and closed cases. Cracked cases. Concluded cases. This is James Brindle’s philosophy: to bring order and conclusion and justice for those that lie forgotten in files by all but those few who work here; those who have excelled in their different departments and have now been shipped in to improve the statistics. Those detectives tasked with solving those cases once deemed high-profile enough for a co-headliner slot on the evening news but have now been left to fester. Sudden disappearances. Kids. The unexplained and inexplicable.
Big cases like these need big men. Stone-turners and stat men. Dirt-diggers. The emotionally stunted. The obsessives. The spectrum-dwellers. The pragmatists. The scientists of crime with the brilliant minds. Those who fail at everything in life except detective work.
Brindle knows this. They all know this. In Cold Storage they revel in their outlier status and do little to dispel the myths surrounding those that exist on the periphery of the police force.
THE SNOW CAPTURES the deer tracks. It marks them out. It finds evidence. Leaves a trail.
The snow makes it harder for them to hide on the open hillsides. The snow is the hunter’s ally.
Against snow all things dark become vulnerable.
More has fallen in the night and the first layer has packed down to a hard crust with another layer of powder sitting on top.
It is still dark when he sets out.
He eats a bowl of porridge and then makes a pack-up of bread and cheese. Oatcakes. Banana. He cleans and oils his rifle.
He throws a couple of stiff rabbits to the dogs on the way out. They’re shivering in their nest of straw.
The dogs are too noisy for where he is going. The dogs never stand still always fussing. They get a scent and they’re gone. No. They’ll stop at home today.
He leaves the back way. Leaves his home. Past the pens and the stone sheds; past the old grain store and the pig sheds and the chicken coop and the barn that has no roof.
He hoofs the back gate open. It was makeshift twenty years; now it is a distorted lattice of rotting wood hanging on one rusted hinge. Symbolic rather than functional.
Then he is straight up onto the slopes below the moor where the wind turbines watch over the farm and cast it in ever-shifting shadows and the hum of them penetrates his sleep.
He bears left. His rifle is held across his chest by his backpack straps. He walks up the narrowing valley. Up into the throat of it.
After a mile or so he comes to the first concrete drain.
There are a dozen of them dotted in a wide circumference all around the moor edge a mile or so apart. They sit below the reservoir. Gaping grey concrete orifices built into the hillside. Some of the locals call them the portals; an ominous name already woven into the mythology of the upper valley.
Each is a doorway beneath a curved concrete carapace. Concrete steps climb down into the stiff Yorkshire peat at a diagonal then take a turn into dank dark corridors that lead to the covered metal grids of the underground culverts. They were installed with the reservoir to act as run-offs for the conduits that are buried deep beneath the moor. In the event of flooding their purpose is to drain the reservoir overflow away from the flat moor-tops that surround the body of water. Unseen these swelling pools are then filtered
away via a complex network of channels to join streams and rivers miles further down the dale.
In spring and autumn when the rainfall is at its most persistent hard copper-coloured water runs through the channels and rises up through the culverts and then the entrances to the portals overflow with brackish peat-heavy water and thick silt. It washes up the steps and then runs in rivulets and streams and channels down the valley sides to join the river at the flat base. Gravity takes care of the rest.
The portals are not for public access. During the first few years that they were open local kids would dare each other to descend the darkening steps and wade through the stagnant water that sits shallow on the floor taking care not to cut their legs on the twisted strips of metal and rocks that lay beneath. Inevitably accidents happened. Parents became more protective. Now fewer children wander the fells or moors or build camps in the scars or makeshift houses up trees in copses. They have been scared off by fearful adults glad that their kids prefer the safety of their televisions and computers.
So the portals are closed off to the world now. Condemned. Gated. Sealed off locked up shut down. Still in use but inaccessible. Signs warn of DANGER and PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT.
Now dawn snow has gathered in drifts. It has blown in to block up these dark toothless mouths and inside the stagnant water has frozen over and mineral deposits have formed the beginnings of small stalactites on the stone ceilings as the moor tightens around them like the skin of a drum.
The soil has frozen too and the gaping mouths seem to purse and close a little.
The man passes the first drain. He views himself as if from a mile away and feels what he is: a tiny figure moving sideways against a great canvas. The gate is padlocked and drift-blocked. He sees a length of timber poking through the ice that covers the drain floor. Beyond that – darkness.
A mile later he passes the next one.
WHEN SHE HAS finished smoking and put the butt of the joint back in her tin – she once read that a cigarette end can take something like six hundred years to rot away – Melanie Muncy makes snowballs and rolls them down the field for the dog to chase. He throws himself down the slopes and then runs back wide-eyed and panting for more.
Her mouth is dry so she scoops up more snow and sucks on it until her tongue and cheeks go numb.
She does not want to return to the silence of the house and her mother sitting there being weird and saying random things or sometimes not saying anything at all. She wonders whether it is the new medication she has been prescribed or just further disintegration. Nor can she handle her father’s mock sincerity – the permanent smile that is plastered on his face but which fails to hide the tightness of his jaw and the desperation in his eyes.
When she is at school she misses the dog and she misses these open spaces but she does not miss her parents. Where once she was alone and without siblings she now has friends and allies. People who have actually grown up around other functioning humans rather than animals and anguished unwashed farmers. They can hold conversations that aren’t about the weather.
And she has civilisation on her doorstep now rather than a walk and then a bus ride and then a train journey away. Beyond the classroom there are shops and pubs and boys and drugs and music to keep her occupied. Being sent to board was the best thing her parents did for her. They gave her freedom.
Melanie Muncy leaves the bothy and decides to walk off the shadowed remains of her anxiety. She wants to enjoy the high as she has ten whole days here with only a small amount of the hash left. She can’t even think about spending new year with her parents.
She leaves the field and takes the track uphill. The dog runs up ahead. The sky is almost as white as the land. There will be more snow later. It is certainly cold enough. The roads up from town will harden and ice over and the drifts will freeze and people won’t be able to get in or out of the hamlet without a snowplough to clear the route.
She will be stuck here. Snowed in – and not for the first time. She will be going nowhere but on foot for the coming days.
Melanie Muncy has a feeling she will be taking the dog out for a lot of walks.
HE CONTINUES UP top. Past the end of the reservoir and onto the moor before he circles down and round to the edge of Acre Dale Scar.
There were always deer round that way and often in groups. Whole families of them. The buck and the doe and their fawns. They are solitary creatures but in winter they tended to band together. In his lifetime he’s seen all kinds around here.
He has seen roe deer. Red deer too. He once saw two great stags gouging at each other’s faces in the rut.
He’s bagged a few over the years. Popped most of them without them even knowing about it. Dead before they hit the ground.
It is clear and cold but the smudged figure against the landscape doesn’t feel it. He has his farmer’s layers on. Long johns vest t-shirt shirt padded shirt. A beanie on top. The walking keeps him warm.
As he approaches Acre Dale he stops. The incline leading down to it is covered in untouched snow before dropping away to a vast hole in the moor edge. A chunk bitten from the spine of the valley. Some of the quarried holes are no bigger than fifty feet across but Acre Dale is a good half-mile at its narrowest point and even longer lengthwise. Deep too. A hundred maybe even a hundred and fifty feet below land-level.
Tracks worn by the footfall of dog walkers and ramblers lead around the rim of Acre Dale but none enter it. He follows one to an escarpment that gives him a view down the rocks and mudslides into the trees below.
He rubs some snow away and lays flat on his belly looking down into the great wooded cavity.
Here he waits and watches and feels the cold permeating his knees his chest and his elbows.
Without leaves on the trees visibility is much better in winter and he can see right through that which in summer will be a dense canopy and provide cover for the creatures.
Fallen trunks half-rotted now lie frozen at angles and the branches reach out to one another. They are bare bones clasping desperately in fleeting connections. He sees two plump squirrels scurry across a limb. Their backs are arched and their bellies distended as they cross Acre Dale without touching ground. As a boy he would pop them for fun. For fur. But not now. Now they are too easy; they are too obvious. Now he seeks something bigger. A more noble kill.
HE WALKS FURTHER around the edge of the quarry to where the moors slip away and trees grow out of the cliff face and the large supplanted boulders of many decades’ rock-fall sit way down below.
He climbs down through the brittle frosted furze. The bank levels out. He slips on the hard ground.
He takes his pack off his back and slots his rifle through the flap then finds a stout stick to help his balance. He digs it into the soil.
He is below the treeline now. He is on the prowl and in his element.
He sees frozen prints: the clear markings of a two-toed ungulate. He squats and examines them. He looks left and he looks right. The tracks follow a line through the rotten leaves. A path. It goes uphill one way and downhill towards the bottom of the scar the other.
The tracks overlap and are of different sizes. These are the prints of more than one animal.
He takes the deer-run down the slope and spots more clear signs: a snag of fur. A nibbled bud. A broken branch with its papery bark scratched and stripped. The deer are near. He knows. Senses it.
Above him there is a small bluff comprised of a series of stalled boulders where the smaller rocks have come to rest against the larger ones when caught mid fall.
He cuts back uphill and climbs out onto the rocks. He removes his gun from his straps and takes a tarp from his pack. He puts the tarp down and then rolls himself in it and lays on the slab of rock. He settles in he settles on he settles down. Turns himself into a statue and lets his mind drift.
IT APPEARS AS a solitary roe; a reward for his patience.
It has wandered up out of the trees and onto the open heath. Right onto the p
ath below. It is unwitting it is unknowing it is in his sights.
He inhales. Holds.
Then: a gentle squeeze and a crack and a slow slump.
Legs folding head bowing eyes glazing. Crumpled.
He exhales.
Now it is his. The bullet has made it so. The bullet exchanged ownership of the deer from the woods to him. Death is the currency. It is something to sell to a man in the Dales who pays money and asks no questions but for the time of the kill and can you get any more? A man who knows what to do with death. How to deal with it. A cold man of the countryside. A man a little like him in fact. Discreet and deft and quiet and part of a chain of events where life and death are muted by grey areas. It’s living off the land. The way it has always been.
There is no morality in dead meat but there is new life when consumed. It is a magic of sorts – that a dead creature can fuel a man. Feed a family. Fill a freezer.
It is hit in the neck and the bullet has severed major arteries and stopped the heart in seconds. A nice clean drop.
The man sees that it is male. He sees the stubbed beginnings of antlers flowering through its scalp like fossilised blossom. Its fur is in good condition too: smooth and glistening and so shiny it appears wet. The deer’s dark face placid. At peace.
A narrow chimney of steam rises from the wound.
He checks the gums and the teeth and finds them to be straight and clean and good and strong. He feels around and finds jagged canines. He is glad it is a roe – the smallest of the deer to be found round here. Yet still it will be heavy to carry back. He looks at it for a moment and weighs it with his eyes and then he decides to dress it where it has fallen. He folds out his tarp and lays the deer on it. He takes a machete and a field knife from his backpack. Then he rolls a cigarette and smokes it. When he has finished smoking he draws up the sleeves of his padded shirt and takes a paring knife and he makes three incisions in the creature’s lower abdomen.
He draws first through fur then meat and then he sees the intestines coiled like a beautiful puzzle. He turns the knife around and folds out a gut hook from the end of it. He puts the hook into the incision then guides it up the creature’s belly splitting fur and skin and meat and membrane along the way.
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