Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  “And everyone’s in the factory, or there’s someone out and about?”

  “Well, yes, there’s Dirk. Dirk Abernethy, he’s our sales manager. He’s in … I’ll need to check with Agnes.”

  “Please. The Sergeant and I will wait in your office, if that’s all right. We expect to hear the machines going silent in the next five minutes.”

  “The media don’t need to know?” said Whittaker, turning hopefully.

  “No, they don’t, and they won’t hear it from us. But this story is on the front page of every damn newspaper in Scotland, so good luck with keeping your part in it a secret.”

  Whittaker, face already ashen as she’d sunk further and further into the grim mire of the truth, seemed to take another turn inwards and downwards.

  “I never look at the papers,” she said. “So depressing.”

  If you thought they were depressing before, thought Bain.

  “And we’re going to have to speak to your on-site security,” said Pereira.

  Whittaker looked blank, and Pereira nodded, although more at her own thought process, the confirmation of what she’d noticed on arrival. There was no on-site security.

  “It’s contracted out, and all handled through CCTV and alarms?”

  “Yes,” said Whittaker. “They’re very good. We never have any problems.”

  “The best security?” said Pereira, and finally there was some life in Whittaker as she seemed to not appreciate the tone in Pereira’s voice.

  “The facility is very secure,” she said.

  “We’ll need to speak to your liaison with the security company.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You have an employee who deals with security? Who coordinates?”

  “We have the security company,” she said, looking blank. “That’s what they do. We contract it out …” and the sentence drifted off.

  “What if there are problems?”

  “There never have been.”

  “Mrs. Whittaker,” said Pereira sharply, “you’re going to need to focus,” and she found herself snapping her fingers in front of Whittaker’s face. “This is bad for you, it’s bad for your business, we know. But you need to take care of the problems in front of you, then worry about the business later when this has settled down and we’ve found out where we are. Maybe we test your premises and find that the work wasn’t done here. Maybe the products were inserted into the distribution chain somewhere else. We don’t know that yet, and we’re not going to know until we’ve undertaken a proper investigation, which starts now. Shut down the plant, speak to your workers, ask everyone to stay until we’ve spoken to them, and then come and see us in your office.”

  Whittaker stared at Pereira, listening, but there was something about her that suggested the words were being processed on a two-second delay, then finally she nodded, said, “Right,” took a deep breath, looked once more down over the shop floor, and then walked quickly away to the stairs at the end of the gantry.

  As they watched her go, Bain took a step forward so that he was standing beside Pereira, his hands in his pockets.

  “There goes the living incarnation of denial” he said.

  “Yep,” said Pereira. “She’ll get her act together quickly enough. She wouldn’t be doing what she is without that ability. Come on, we’ll get a staff list, start splitting them up between us.”

  “Boss,” said Bain, and they walked back through into the small suite of offices behind.

  *

  DCI Cooper was having lunch with an old friend, DCI Slater. Slates, as he’d been known since primary school. They had come through police college together, late-eighties, to a soundtrack of Simple Minds and U2. They had found each other at the far end of the restaurant in the Dalmarnock HQ. They called it a restaurant, at any rate. The Baillie.

  If one of them could have taken a step back from their conversations, they might have noticed that they had spent close on thirty years complaining about the police service, and might have wondered why they had never bothered to try to find something else to do. Of course, they enjoyed the police service, just as they enjoyed complaining about it.

  “What about you?” asked Slater, having spent a few minutes talking about the restrictions placed upon him from above, in a case involving drug dealers in Castlemilk. “Everyone’s a fucking victim,” he’d said. “How’s the office? You got your signed photo of Carrie Fisher up on the wall yet?”

  Cooper laughed.

  “Usually leave it a week or two,” he said.

  “It’s all right to admit that you’ve grown out of it,” said Slater, laughing too. “And really, she’s what, like twenty-five in that picture? Twenty-one even? One of these days it’s going to be kind of creepy.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “And when I say one of these days, I mean, like fifteen years ago.”

  “Fuck off,” Cooper repeated, and Slater laughed again. They’d had the same conversation before, just as Cooper regularly mocked Slater for his attraction to Jennifer Lawrence.

  “How’s the team looking?” asked Slater, through a mouthful of cottage pie, and Cooper shrugged.

  “Difficult to say, haven’t met some of them yet. We lost a DI already, post got cut two months ago. Not that they cut the team’s workload.”

  “So, how many DIs you got? Two, just?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, could be worse. You hear about Tony? Just got shafted.”

  “Yeah, I know. Poor bastard.”

  “Who d’you have?”

  Cooper wiped the back of his hand across his chin, then noticed the paper napkin and lifted it to wipe the corners of his mouth. Took a drink of Coke Zero.

  “Forsyth and Pereira. Haven’t met Forsyth yet, on leave. Won’t see him for, I don’t know, couple of weeks. What?” he asked, as Slater was smiling.

  “Nothing,” said Slater, continuing to eat. “You got the box ticker, that’s all. Funny.”

  “The box ticker,” said Cooper, shaking his head. “Jesus. Indian single mother. Fuck me, I’m surprised she’s not Chief Constable already.”

  Slater laughed.

  “I know,” he said. “Still, I heard she’s all right. You remember Malky, he worked with us on the Henderson takedown? He was her boss in Partick, said she was pretty decent. Knows her shit.”

  “Huh,” said Cooper, “well we’ll see. She’s got the sliced beef case.”

  “Really? Nice.”

  “Would’ve taken it myself, but she was on it before I got to my desk.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Slater.

  “Yeah,” said Cooper ruefully, as though he was the boss in name only, but had little control.

  Slater laughed again, for no particular reason, shook his head as he lifted the last of his half pint of cider.

  “You know she’s bisexual ‘n’ all, right?”

  Cooper looked at him curiously, trying to work out if he was kidding.

  “Wait, what?” he said after a few seconds, the phrasing he’d learned from his teenage children.

  “I’m not making it up,” said Slater. “She was married to a guy, then left him for a dyke.”

  Cooper held his gaze for another few seconds, then looked away again across the restaurant, I don’t believe it written on his face.

  “So, she’s Indian, she’s a single mother, she’s divorced and she’s a lesbian? Holy shit.”

  “Bisexual, mate,” said Slater. “You’ve still got a chance,” and he laughed.

  “No wonder they call her the box ticker,” said Cooper, albeit, few outside of their current table of two knew Pereira as the box ticker. “I mean, really, is there anything she doesn’t have? I’m surprised she’s not in a fucking wheelchair.”

  “Ha,” said Slater. “She’d be First Minister by now.”

  “Fuck me,” said Cooper. “I mean … what happened to … I mean, why can’t people just be promoted because of their police work? What happened to being a detective, getting a job
done, and getting rewarded for it? Now it’s all, see how many of these fucking boxes you can tick, and if you cross the threshold, congratulations!”

  Slater was laughing, food in his mouth, last of his cider raised to his lips.

  “Still,” he said, “you never know. Malky said she was decent, so …”

  Cooper was still shaking his head, looking around at the other tables, wondering if he could engage someone else’s eye, draw them into the conversation, make them part of the outrage.

  “I don’t remember what Malky was like,” he said eventually, looking back at the rest of his plate, as though Malky had to be dismissed.

  Malky’s opinion didn’t count. Malky’s opinion wasn’t part of the narrative.

  CHAPTER 5

  Whittaker had regained some of her composure, although that particular Glenn Close-ness about her, that Bain had identified at the beginning, would not be returning any time soon.

  It was three hours later, morning having given way to a grey, miserable afternoon, plenty of people mentally chalked off their list, but with nothing yet to allow Pereira and Bain to think they’d had a steer in the right direction.

  They all had coffee, the ubiquitous drink of the age. A decent cup too, thought Pereira. She was standing at the window, looking out over the car park, at the assembled press corps at the gate. Bain was sitting behind her, on one of the chairs opposite Whittaker. Sometime in the next day or two, Whittaker was going to have to contract actual, live security guards to post at the gate, but for the moment she had the police doing the job for her.

  The factory had been shut down until further notice. Every employee had been interviewed, no one giving up any useful information in the process. The SOCOs were still working at the facility, but already numerous samples had been taken and dispatched for testing.

  DC Somerville, the newest member of Pereira’s team, had been dispatched to the security firm to get a better understanding of the level of protection applied to the factory, and to look at any available CCTV footage for the days preceding the dispatch of the butchered and packaged human flesh.

  “How long do they take?” asked Whittaker. “The tests?”

  Bain made a small movement with his coffee cup, indicating his readiness to answer, and she turned her attention to him, rather than to Pereira’s back.

  “It’s the bane of our lives, to be honest. It can take ages. You ever watch CSI, any of those shows?”

  She shook her head, indeed looked as though she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Anyway, it’s nothing like that. Drives us nuts. However …” and he nodded towards the window, “the press are in full attendance, and no one wants that. These things will be expedited, as they have been already on this case, so we can expect the basic answers pretty quickly. You know, the initial is there any human flesh question, we should have the answer to in,” and he hesitated, looking at his watch, “no time at all,” he settled on. “If they get a positive match for human DNA we can assume it’ll be Kevin Moyes, but we’ll have to wait a little longer for confirmation. Even then, end of the day, tomorrow morning. As long as, of course, that it’s the same guy, or someone else we have on our database. If it turns out to be random DNA that we don’t have on record …” and he completed the sentence with a wave.

  Pereira turned back, thinking that Bain could have answered the question with half the amount of words.

  “We need to speak about the people we haven’t seen. You said there was one person missing from the shop floor?”

  “Yes,” said Whittaker. “Simon confirmed what I thought. Just a young kid, Chantelle. She’s been with us a while, but you know … still young.”

  “What’s the problem with Chantelle?” asked Bain.

  “No problem,” said Whittaker.

  “You said earlier she’d been off for a few days.”

  “Right, yes,” she said, nodding. “Of course. She’s em … well, it’s rather personal.”

  A moment, she looked away from Bain, back to Pereira, as though she was more likely to be understanding of Chantelle’s need for personal space.

  “I mean, I say personal,” she continued. “The only reason we’ve got any idea what’s wrong with her is because she put it on her Facebook page. All we got from her was a doctor’s note, two weeks off, see you in December.”

  “So,” said Bain, “if she’s all right putting it on social media, are you all right telling us, or shall we go onto Facebook and look for ourselves?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Whittaker, eyes widening a little, dropping again at the same time, so that when she replied, she was staring at a spot on the floor to Bain’s right. “She wrote that she’d had an abortion. That was … I mean, you’d think that kind of thing might be private, but it seems nothing is private anymore to the younger generation. I suppose we should be lucky she didn’t post video of the procedure.”

  She looked at Pereira straight away in apology, as though she might have been offended.

  “Did anyone know she was pregnant beforehand?” asked Pereira.

  Given the things that passed through their office on a daily basis, someone telling the world via Facebook that they’d aborted a pregnancy barely registered on the scale of abnormal.

  “Not here.”

  “Is she married, boyfriend …?”

  “It appears she has something of a reputation. I mean, this kind of stuff doesn’t really reach us up here, of course, but after that, and the sick note, Simon gave me the heads up. She puts herself around. Let’s just say, there’s more than one of the lads down there relieved that she won’t be hearing the patter of tiny feet. You know, just in case.”

  “When was her last day at work?” asked Bain.

  “Tuesday,” said Whittaker. “Last Tuesday.”

  “The day the meat was sent to MeatLux?”

  Whittaker didn’t immediately answer, as though she was thinking it through, trying to decide if she would implicate the company in any way by admitting it. At the moment, however, this was just a discussion about Chantelle. The chances of Chantelle putting a human body through four different machines seemed slim, and if she had, well she deserved to be thrown under the bus. It was a bus Whittaker would happily drive.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine,” said Pereira. “We’ll need to speak to her. You can give us her details?”

  “Of course. But, I’m sure … I don’t think Chantelle would be capable. In fact, I’m not sure, given how many people work down there, how anyone would be. I’m not just saying that, by the way.”

  “Let’s wait and see what the test results tell us, then we can start trying to put it together,” said Pereira.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?” asked Bain.

  “Who?”

  “Chantelle. What did she say in her Facebook message?”

  Whittaker looked away for a moment, then smiled dolefully at the thought of it, and said, “She put three sad-face emojis, then tagged it #thehorror, #abortionsucks, #neveragain.”

  Having spoken, she gave them a look that spoke of the incorrigibility and indecipherability of young people, and shrugged.

  “Peculiar, but nevertheless, pretty clear,” she said. “She then followed it up with a photograph of her own, actual sad face.”

  “We’ll take her details,” said Pereira, wanting to move the conversation on from the true horror of youth and social media. “What can you tell us about Dirk?”

  Whittaker seemed surprised for a moment by the change of direction, then said, “Dirk Abernethy?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s our sales manager.”

  “Yes. He’s not in the office today?”

  “No. I mean, he has an office, but he’s not often here. Sales managers, you know. They’re out on the road. I guess the younger ones these days are all video conferencing and networking across whatever platforms, but Dirk’s old school. Likes to put the company car to good use.”

  �
�Has he been here much in the last week?”

  “Oh, he shows his face most days. First thing in the morning, last thing in the evening. It’s not often that he actually misses a full day. Sometimes he’ll be in first thing, he’ll head out, might have a meeting in Dundee, then he’ll head up to Aberdeen for more meetings, he’ll overnight, head to Inverness, down through Perth, maybe Stirling, then he’ll pop into the office at the end of the day.”

  “Did you see him today?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He was in Newcastle last night. Well, I say … Hexham, nearer Hexham.”

  “You’re expecting him in later?”

  “That would be the norm.”

  “And has there been anything out of the norm in Dirk’s movements since last week?”

  Whittaker stared across the desk for a moment, then, slightly wide-eyed, said, “You’re not suggesting Dirk …”

  “Mrs. Whittaker,” said Pereira, “if this turns out to be the work of one of your staff, whoever it is, the chances are you will be taken aback. So, can we–”

  “But Dirk?”

  “We’ll take Dirk’s details as well, thank you,” said Bain.

  “Of course,” she said. “Would there be anything else?”

  Pereira held her gaze for a moment, noticing Whittaker retreat slightly at her look. There was still plenty to talk about.

  *

  “So, you think Dirk really spends his life on the road?” asked Bain, as they got into Pereira’s car.

  Another hour later, having spent much of the time sitting with Whittaker and Simon the floor manager, talking through the exact process that the different types of meat went through, from raw meat, through the cooking stage, to the splicing and packaging. It was, Pereira had to admit, difficult to see how anyone could have inserted a human body into the process, with so many other people working in the factory. There was also, so far, no hint of human bone.

  The discarded bones from the factory had already been removed from the previous week, and officers had been dispatched to the appropriate waste collection facility to see if the surplus animal parts from the factory could be isolated and examined.