Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  “Ever been down here before?” asked Bain, as a teenage girl walked past, cigarette in one hand, taking an iPhone 7 selfie with the other.

  “When I was kid, once or twice with the school. My parents never came.”

  “You should bring the kids,” said Bain.

  “Have you met Anais?” said Pereira, and Bain smiled. “Come on, let’s talk to the sandwich man,” and she turned. They walked into the shop, the bell on the door tinkling as they entered.

  There were two people behind the counter, a young woman who was washing dishes at the back, and a man who was currently making a sandwich on the counter behind the clear display case.

  Despite all the price and sandwich labels inside the case, there were no sandwiches.

  “Sorry, folks,” said the Sandwich Man without looking up. “Total run today.”

  They looked at the empty cases, then they both turned and looked outside at the deserted street and sea front, and then turned back.

  “Weather-wise, best day we’ve had since we opened,” said the Sandwich Man. “Just give me a minute, I’m doing another batch of tuna mayo. You want something else, let me know, and I’ll do it next.”

  He looked up, smiling. The smile died as soon as he saw the suits, and the faces of Pereira and Bain.

  “Wait, what?” said the Sandwich Man. “Food Standards?”

  Pereira held forward her ID.

  “Detective Inspector Pereira, Detective Sergeant Bain,” she said.

  The Sandwich Man studied her ID closely.

  “Serious Crime Unit?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to close the shop, Mr Craven.”

  “Why? I can’t. I mean …” and he looked helplessly around the establishment, as though there might be some obvious, identifiable reason why he couldn’t possibly close. The girl at the sink had finally turned, and was looking worriedly at Pereira.

  “Seriously,” said the Sandwich Man, “you can’t close the shop. The kids get out of school in an hour. They’re down here like locusts. It’s like, the only business we get.”

  Pereira and Bain looked down at the empty display of sandwiches. The Sandwich Man watched them, nodded in a resigned way, and said, “All right. We’ve barely sold anything all day. The only time we really shift is when the school gets out. Even then … But still, you can’t close the shop. Not now.”

  Bain turned, put the bolt across on the front door and turned the “closed” sign round to face outwards.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Magic.”

  “That’s not funny,” said the Sandwich Man.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk, Mr Craven?” said Pereira.

  “Sure. How about my lawyer’s office?”

  Pereira silenced the objections with a look. The fight left the Sandwich Man, even though he still didn’t understand what it was about, and then he nodded at the brown wooden door on the other side of the counter.

  *

  They were standing in a small, untidy office, a room in which no one ever spent much time. There was dust on the shelves, paperwork in a few untidy piles on the desk, boxes of water and soft drinks on the floor, the picture on the calendar still showing October. Closer inspection would reveal, indeed, that it was October from three years previously, an autumn view along Glen Affric. The dust in the room predated the opening of the shop by quite some time.

  The Sandwich Man stood with his back to the window, his arms folded, as Bain closed the door behind them.

  They took a moment to size each other up. Pereira let the silence do the work for her, watching as Craven grew more agitated. Finally he unfolded his arms, folded them again and said, “What?”

  “Where do you get your cold meat?” asked Pereira.

  “What d’you mean?”

  She lowered her head a little, lifting her eyes at the same time, so that the question was repeated with a somewhat affected glower. Affected or not, it worked, as she looked up at him from her position of being perhaps nine or ten inches shorter than he was.

  “There’s a delivery guy,” said Craven eventually. “He delivers the meat.”

  “Always the same guy?”

  “No. There are a few of them. Look, it’s not like I have my own farm, like I’m raising the pigs and chickens. I order from MPP.”

  “Who are MPP?”

  “They’re a … wait, they’re the producers, but they don’t send the meat. The meat comes via a distribution company. MeatLux. The delivery guy works for MeatLux. Those people are huge, they deliver to half of Scotland.”

  “Don’t know the name,” said Pereira.

  “Why would you? They’re trade. They don’t do adverts on the tele at Christmas.”

  “Funny. Where are they based?”

  “Eurocentral.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  He smirked. “Jesus, seriously? Have you ever been to the sweat shop in Indonesia that makes your plastic police whistle?”

  “D’you know if they deliver to any other outlets on the island?” asked Bain, changing the course of the questioning.

  Pereira kept her eyes on Craven. She encouraged Bain to throw in questions from the sidelines, so didn’t mind the change of tack.

  Craven looked over at Bain, head shaking, having moved subconsciously to a place where every single question would be treated with disdain.

  “Sure. There’s another sandwich place along the road, don’t remember the name …”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “Whatever, you’ll find it easily enough. Couple of cafés, you’ll need to check with them. And the Co-Market, I think they deliver there too. These guys deliver everywhere in Scotland, man. Seriously, I don’t believe you people. I’m just trying to make a living here, trying to get something going. Was on benefits for five year, got off my arse, trying not to be one of those people. Doing my best, man, and along youse come and shut me down. What the fuck?”

  “When did you take your last delivery?” asked Pereira, ignoring the commentary. If it was true — and when the police interviewed anyone about anything, it was usually worth assuming that whatever they said wouldn’t be — then this was going to be a killer blow to him, and a dreadful hard luck story. Not many sandwich shops are going to survive serving human flesh, given that people would likely have eaten that flesh. This story was going to blow up, and Eat ‘N’ Go — along with any other outlet which took a delivery of similar meat — was going to be in trouble.

  “Wednesday,” said Craven. “They come every Wednesday morning. We get our supply for the week. Not that we get all that much, mind. Slow start, right? But we’ll get there. I mean, I know what everyone’s thinking. Why open a sandwich shop in a place like this in October, right? But we’ll be fine, I’ve done the maths, and when spring comes, when summer comes, we’ll be well set. Established. All the kinks ironed out. Got a plan, you see,” he said, tapping the side of his head, “then along come you people with whatever the fuck this actually is. Jesus.”

  “Maybe,” said Pereira, “rather than blaming the police, you could blame the person who inserted human flesh into your cold meat order.”

  His face changed, shoulders straightened a little. In an instant, both Pereira and Bain could see the genuineness of the reaction. He hadn’t seen that coming.

  “And perhaps,” said Bain, “you could consider looking in the mirror, as you were the one who blindly put it out for sale when you didn’t know what it was.”

  “You labelled it as pork?” asked Pereira.

  “Yes,” he said, then added, “Jesus,” with a shake of the head, as he continued to come to terms with the news. “Who was it?” he asked, looking up.

  “Why did you take it off sale?”

  Craven’s face was still contorted in query, then he shook it off, and looked curiously at Pereira, as though having to recall the question she’d just asked.

  “Some guy … a customer who bought the sandwich
, brought it back half-eaten, said it was beef. So I had a taste, and he was right. Didn’t taste like pork.”

  He swallowed, seeming now to realise the implication. He was a cannibal. He had made cannibals out of his customers.

  “What’d you think it tasted like?” asked Bain.

  Still getting used to the fact that he’d eaten another human, Craven stared at the floor. Swallowed again.

  “I think I need a glass of water,” he said. “Feeling a bit …” and he finished the sentence with another shake of the head.

  Pereira looked around the room, walked over to the box of bottled water, lifted the edge of the cardboard, took out a 500ml bottle, opened the top and passed it to him.

  “It’s OK, Mr Craven,” she said, as he took a gulp, then unnecessarily wiped the back of his hand across his face. “It was several days ago. You don’t sound like you ate much of it. You did the right thing contacting the FSA.”

  “Bastard here just told me to look in the mirror,” he said, head shaking yet again, before taking another gulp of water.

  “D’you remember how many people would’ve eaten the meat?” asked Bain.

  “Three,” said Craven, “maybe four. Still had plenty left. Thank fuck we barely have any customers, right?”

  “No one else noticed?”

  “Not that they said. People usually don’t.”

  “Any complaints about any of the other meat you served?” asked Pereira, and once again this seemed to shake Craven, and his shoulders tensed.

  “Wait, what?” he said. “I thought it was just this.”

  “So it is, as far as we know,” said Pereira. “But did anyone say anything else about any of your other sandwiches?”

  Another loud swallow, followed by Craven lifting the bottle to his mouth, and another glance off to the side.

  “D’you know a Kevin Moyes?” asked Bain, and Craven switched his gaze, eyes widening, and once more the bottle of water was lifted to his mouth.

  Not much of a poker face, thought Pereira.

  CHAPTER 3

  The day passed quickly, the case seeming to grow in scale with every new development, every question asked, every minute, every hour.

  Pereira and Bain were finally returning to the office just before eight o’clock, the evening long since arrived, dark and grim, Pereira having completely forgotten about Parker and the fact that he would no longer be there.

  They had taken away two other kinds of meat from Eat ‘N’ Go, as well as a tuna mayo mix. They had contacted all the other businesses on Millport that received meat products from MeatLux, they had noted the anomalies, there had been at least two other people who had noticed something amiss, they had taken meat for testing from all of them, and had asked that all meat products delivered by MeatLux the previous week be taken off the shelves pending testing and official word from the FSA.

  The last of these met with some resistance, given that Pereira was vague on the nature of the problem. Nevertheless, even without the paperwork to hand to officially back up the request, she proscribed the selling of the meat amid the grumbling, and the calls were put through to the FSA to expedite the matter.

  There followed a call to the MeatLux distribution depot. The manifest for the previous Wednesday was requested and sent over by e-mail. Pereira and Bain then visited a couple of the stores in Largs to establish that the meat was of a similar nature, and in one simple stroke of confirmation, the matter had gone beyond Millport and the island of Cumbrae, to the Ayrshire coast, and who knew how far beyond.

  Ultimately, however, it was unlikely to be about MeatLux. They were the distribution company, and while it was possible that someone had inserted the human meat at this point, they also needed to trace the meat products back to their production facility just outside Cumbernauld.

  At five o’clock, for what must have been the fiftieth time that year, Pereira had had to call her mother to ask if she could spend a little longer with the children than anticipated, and to tell her to go ahead and eat without her. She would be home when she was home, and tell Robin not to stay awake waiting for her.

  She had then continued to conduct the investigation with her traditional mother’s guilt sitting in a dark ball in the middle of her stomach, never quite able to shake off the feeling that barely a day went by when she didn’t let down her children.

  “It’s one of those crimes,” said Bain from the passenger seat, as they sat in a queue of roadworks-related traffic on the M74, heading back towards Dalmarnock, having spent the previous two hours in an office in Largs station making calls, and watching as the investigation mushroomed.

  “One of what crimes?” asked Pereira, having left enough of a gap to see if he’d been going to continue with his thought process without prompting.

  “On the face of it, I mean, I’m saying this here, but I wouldn’t say it in a press conference, but there’s something comical about it. Know what I mean? Kevin Moyes has likely been murdered, which is horrible. It’s always horrible. And it looks like he was expertly butchered, and now we don’t know how many people actually ate the guy. Ate him. And yet, it’s kind of funny. I mean, the Coen Brothers probably already made this movie, right? And if they didn’t, they will. And if they made the movie, well, it’d be funny. That’s all.”

  “I guess,” said Pereira, having listened to most of what he’d said with a raised eyebrow. “But it is so utterly grotesque. And sad, despite the seeming indifference of Moyes’s partner. Oh, did we get confirmation on his parents?”

  “Father’s dead, the mother lives in Selkirk. I spoke to DI Burnham down there. He’s been round. She’s in shock, nothing to add. Burnham said he’d go back if we come up with anything specific.”

  Having felt a burst of fear at letting something slip through the net, she quickly relaxed, although the feeling remained that the catalogue of things to do in relation to a case that had started with the simple transaction of her boss handing over a file was so great that she was bound to have missed something, despite the list she had continually updated in her notebook through the day.

  “You think we’ll hang on to the investigation?” asked Bain.

  “Don’t know, Marc,” she said. “Maybe it depends where the focus switches. If it turns out that it goes little further than Millport and Largs, then I don’t see why not. It’s a peculiar coincidence that a guy from there disappears, then he shows up on Cumbrae once again, in cold meat form, via an industrial estate forty-five miles away, just off the M8. So, there’s something about it that implies it’s just going to be our one guy, and whoever orchestrated the whole thing knew how to make sure the meat ended back up there. Or else … well, when you start thinking big, this could go anywhere. How big d’you want it to be? One dead guy, distributed all over Scotland, or fifty dead guys?”

  “There are not going to be fifty dead guys,” said Bain, although his words were spoken with little conviction.

  “Let’s hope not,” she said. “We’ll need to get back and speak to Parker and find out wh … Not Parker,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Cooper.”

  “Cooper. Nice job for him to get on his first day,” she said. “So, we can speculate all we like, but we’ll wait and see. I guess we’ll be on it at least until we get into the factory tomorrow morning, see the lay of the land.”

  “You know anything about him?” asked Bain, as the speed of the traffic began to pick up, although they could see far enough ahead to know that they would slow again quickly.

  “On promotion, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll be fine. In a way, this case might be a decent way for him to make his mark. Rather than landing and having to force something to impress himself upon the station, he gets this tasty human flesh story right off the bat. Might be all he needs.”

  “Cop of the Month,” said Bain, making the banner headline gesture, and Pereira smiled.

  As the car slowed to a standstill, the conversation came to a stop alongside it. There was nowhere else for
them to go now. They had to get back to the station, they had to find out what the new boss was thinking, and then they would have to settle in for the long haul, waiting to find out the full extent of the horror.

  Pereira looked at the digital clock, she checked her watch, she looked at the queue of traffic ahead. She tapped her fingers and finally reached over and turned on the CD player. They Can’t Take That Away From Me, mid-song, and she flipped it back to the start, so that the piercing trumpet picking out the melody filled the car, though the volume was down low.

  They inched forward, which somehow seemed at odds with the investigation, which had gone from nought to a hundred and eighty in a very short period of time. A spit of rain on the windscreen and she flipped the wipers.

  She stared straight ahead at the rear of the red Volkswagen inching along in front. Ticking items off in her head, her black Moleskine notebook bent into the cup holder beside the handbrake, thinking that she would at least have plenty of time to write in it should she think of something she’d so far missed.

  “This isn’t Ella Fitzgerald,” said Bain, absentmindedly, after a while.

  “Billie Holliday,” said Pereira.

  “Ah,” said Bain.

  *

  DCI Cooper was not a particularly large man, but he did have a large man’s belly, the kind that might not have been too difficult to get rid of with some exercise, fewer fish suppers and less beer. He was clean shaven, and had a thick, straight mat of black hair that had either not been washed for a few days, or was held in place by some old-fashioned men’s hair product. Pereira assumed the latter. His white shirt was stretched over his belly, the end of the plain, dark blue tie did not quite reach his waist.

  His office door was open when they arrived at the station, so Pereira went straight there without stopping at her desk, Bain accompanying her. They knocked and entered, Cooper looking away from his computer as they walked in. They stood for a moment, waiting, as he stared at them.

  “DI Pereira, Sergeant Bain, I presume,” he said finally. “Come in.”