Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  “He’s old school, apparently,” said Pereira, and Bain smiled. “I don’t know if she even believed it herself when she said it. It was as though she’d never talked through Dirk’s work movements out loud before, and as she spoke, she was thinking, ‘hang on a second’ …”

  “Maybe he’s living a double life with another family, ten miles away. Or just sitting with his feet up in a one-bedroomed flat, making the odd five-minute call to Aberdeen.”

  “Neither of which, even if they turned out to be the case, would make him a murderer. Anyway,” she said, waving off the thought of Dirk Abernethy, as they were so far away from establishing the basic groundwork of this case that it would be impossible to even say as yet that he was of any interest to them, “let’s go and speak to Chantelle, and at least chalk her off the list.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “We all make choices,” said Chantelle Crone. “Look, people are going to think what they’re going to think, haters are gonna hate, et cetera et cetera. Doesn’t matter what you do, people judge you. I made the call to live my life out there in the open. You’ve looked at my Facebook page?”

  “Yes,” said Pereira.

  “Well, you know. You know what I’m doing. Everything goes on there. It’s an experiment. What happens when you put every single aspect of your life on the Internet? Anyone who wants to know, can know everything. What I’m eating, when I have my period, when I go to the bathroom, when I have an abortion. That’s just how it is.”

  “You never mentioned you were pregnant before you went for an abortion,” said Bain. “That’s hardly being true to your ethic.”

  She held Bain’s gaze. Hmm, thought Pereira, you can always tell when the outer skin has been pricked. Chantelle hadn’t thought of that, that one simple question, and here she was visibly thinking her way around it.

  “That one I had to think about,” she said, her voice composed, quickly settling on an angle.

  “Why was that?”

  “It’s a pretty big thing. I mean, babies aren’t just for Christmas, right?”

  “That’s not a phrase,” said Pereira.

  “Well, I believe I just said it, so I guess that makes it a phrase,” she said.

  “So, having made the decision to not tell anyone about the pregnancy, why then tell everyone about bringing it to an end?” asked Bain.

  “I liked the idea of shocking people. That’s what people tell me sometimes. They say there are no surprises with me. If I buy the new Adele CD, no one’s like, OMFG, I didn’t know you liked Adele, bitch, ‘cause they all know I’ve been thinking about buying it. So, you know, it’s no biggie. Then people be like, throw some shit in there, girlfriend. And I was lying there, and the doctor was doing whatever, and I thought, well this is some kind of shit to be throwing in there. So that’s what happened. I just went for it.”

  “Did you consult the father?” asked Pereira.

  Chantelle shook her head.

  “I mean, it wasn’t because I thought it was going to complicate things or nothing, I wasn’t going to care what he said. It was just, you know, there were … a few candidates, you know?”

  She smiled at Pereira, then transferred the smile to Bain, accompanied by a small movement of the eyebrows.

  “So, your epic gangbang post wasn’t just referring to something you’d watched on TV?” he said.

  “No,” she said, smiling. “And it wasn’t only that night, you know. There’ve been a few. You can’t taste the pie without breaking a few eggs.”

  “That’s not a phrase either,” said Bain.

  “It is now,” said Chantelle.

  “I was wondering if it was all true?” asked Pereira.

  “The shagging?”

  Pereira nodded.

  “Oh, sure. You’ve got to get it while you can, eh? You’re going along, thinking everything’s fine, then one day you hit, like, twenty-eight, your tits take a dive, you start to dry up and you might as well throw in the towel and get married.”

  “How many sexual partners do you have a month?” asked Pereira, deciding not to dwell on the commentary.

  “Really? That’s a question for the police? Just because some weird shit may, or may not, have been going down at my workplace?”

  Pereira countered the question with silence.

  “Depends,” said Chantelle quickly, as she viewed silence as something that had to be filled. “If there’s no particular party to go to, and you know what kind of party we’re talking about here, right, then it might be ten. Throw in a party or two, then you’re looking at twenty, maybe thirty or more. You know, in a good month.”

  “And you don’t take birth control?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “What birth control method do you use?”

  “Seriously?” said Chantelle, laughing, and she looked at Bain. “You want to give it a go love, and you might find out?”

  “What birth control method do you use?” asked Pereira.

  Chantelle turned contemptuously back to Pereira, head shaking. Yet, there was something so young and flirtatious in her manner that contempt did not sit particularly easy upon her.

  “Where are we going with this?” she said. “I mean, really?”

  “There’s a chance,” said Pereira, “that whoever killed Kevin Moyes and sliced up his body for distribution had access to the MPP factory. As a worker there, you would be such a person.”

  “You said when you came in. What’s that got to do with me–”

  “You went off work the day after the meat was dispatched from the factory. If you wanted to take yourself out of the way, then you’d need a story. And here, out of the blue, having told no one of your pregnancy, you have an abortion and your doctor signs you off for a fortnight.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes,” said Pereira, “I am serious. It seems peculiar that someone who has as many sexual partners as you claim to have, would allow herself to get pregnant. What birth control method do you use?”

  “I’m on the pill,” she snapped, eyes rolling. “Jesus.”

  “You forgot to take it?”

  “Aye, I did. Three days running.”

  “Really?”

  “Aye. Pissed every night, kept slipping my mind.”

  She looked harshly at Pereira, all thoughts of anything flirtatious with Bain having been banished.

  “Too busy shagging,” she spat out.

  “You ever sleep with Kevin Moyes?” asked Pereira.

  Chantelle took a moment, a pause that could have meant anything, and then she smiled. “I usually don’t know their names.”

  “Before today, did you know the name Kevin Moyes?”

  “No, officer, I did not.”

  Bain reached inside his jacket pocket and took out the photograph of Moyes, holding it out for Chantelle to see. She looked down at it with studied disinterest, then looked grimly up at Bain.

  “Don’t recognise him. Have you got one of his cock?”

  *

  The child, Kingdom, was on the floor with a Winnie The Pooh colouring book, meticulously filling in the pink on Piglet. The concentration and intent, at least, were meticulous, the motor skills not quite so great.

  The local Millport police officer — Constable Williams — had paid two visits to see Jacqueline Hannity since Pereira had spoken to her the previous day, updating her as it had become clear that it was not just Moyes’s leg that had been butchered, and that there was no question that he was dead.

  “When you reported Kevin missing previously, you didn’t give the constable a huge amount of information,” said Pereira. “We’re going to need that now. We need to know everything he did, everyone he knew, if there was anyone likely to have wanted to do him any harm.”

  “Moyesy?” she said, laughing. “Really, he was a gormless halfwit. Right enough, I wanted to do him harm sometimes, but it was just ‘cause he was so glaicket. Nothing about him, you know, the way some people are.”

  “Why did
you live with him?” asked Bain.

  “It was the money, at first. Met him in a bar one night, he was down here doing a bit of fishing. Said his grandma had just pegged it and left him fifty grand. I thought, he’ll do me.”

  A fine romance, thought Pereira, the caustic notion instantly making her think of her own romantic failures. Lena flashed through her head, as she so often did, and was just as quickly banished. All those maudlin, miserablist thoughts of Lena were for when she was lying awake in bed, on her own, failing to get to sleep.

  “He was on the dole, so was I. He was living in this scuzzy little apartment in Cumbernauld, so I says to him to come down here. He went out fishing every day, and I’m like that, aye fine, whatever. Me and Dom are all right on our own, aren’t we, Dom?”

  Kingdom didn’t reply.

  “Had a few big holidays. Week in Blackpool, that kind of thing.”

  “How long’d the money last?” asked Bain, keeping his thoughts to himself on whether a week in Blackpool constituted a big holiday. It was, at least, frugal compared to some of the places you could go with fifty thousand.

  “Don’t know that it had run out,” she said. “He still seemed to have plenty of money, you know.”

  “He was good with money, then?” said Bain.

  “He was shite with money. So’m I.”

  She glanced down at the boy, as though she felt she shouldn’t be making such confessions in front of him.

  “Then how is it that there’s still plenty of money?”

  She stared at the carpet, as though she’d never really thought about it, and then looked back up. She shrugged.

  “I used to say to him, how many times have you spent that fifty grand?”

  “And?”

  “He’d just laugh and tell us to fuck off.”

  Pereira got up and walked to the window, so that she was standing in the spot where Bain had stood the day before. Hannity watched her for a moment, and so did Kingdom, the crayon poised over the picture for a second, waiting to see if Pereira was going to do anything interesting, and then when she settled in to just standing at the window, staring out at the bleak November day, he returned to the picture. Eeyore was also getting coloured in pink.

  “But you stayed together?” asked Bain.

  Casual questions, thought Pereira, just trying to get her relaxed and talking. The facts were coming, though. Cumbernauld. That piece of information had come out of the blue.

  “If you could call it that,” said Hannity.

  “You didn’t have much of a life?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t even know what that means. I mean, what kind of life does anyone have, living down here in a dead end pit like this? Me and Dom would do our thing, Moyesy played with his Xbox, watched porn and went fishing. That was about it.”

  “You didn’t ask him to leave?”

  “Why’d I do that? I mean, it’s no’ like I’d’ve had Ryan Gosling down here if it hadn’t been for Moyesy. He did his thing, we did ours. I mean, I didn’t like it when he watched porn with Dom, but apart from that … He still did a little bit of something on the side up by, he’d go off every now and again, come back after a couple of days. You suppose maybe he was actually getting a bit of dosh those times? Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Up by?”

  “Cumbernauld.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a month, probably.”

  Hannity stared at the window, but Bain could tell she wasn’t looking at Pereira. Just staring off into the distance. Her phone was lying on the arm of the sofa, and she tapped it occasionally, distracted.

  “Aye, about once a month,” she repeated. “Don’t think it was any more than that.”

  “He stayed overnight?”

  “Aye. Maybe one night, maybe two. Leave in the morning, come back the following evening or the day after. He’ll no’ be doing that anymore.”

  “And you’ve no idea what he was doing, who he was with, where he was staying?”

  The sharp ring of Pereira’s phone cut into the room. She caught Hannity’s eye, and answered the phone without speaking. Listened to the message for around a minute or so, said, “OK, thanks, Col,” then hung up.

  The interview had been paused while the one-sided conversation took place, but did not immediately restart, so Pereira repeated, “You’ve no idea what he was doing, who he was with, where he was staying?”

  Hannity took a deep breath as though this question deserved some consideration, then said, “There was a guy called Dirk, that was all. Only name he ever mentioned, didn’t get his second name. Dirk. Like Dick, but with an ‘r’.”

  “Thanks,” said Bain.

  “Instead of a ‘c’.”

  “Got it,” said Bain. “And you have no idea what they were doing?”

  “Plausible deniability,” she said. “That’s what Moyesy called it. He said I should have plausible deniability. So, I guess you can take it from that it was probably dodgy AF.”

  “Did you ever think it was possible there was no one called Dirk, there was nothing dodgy, and he was just spending the night with another woman?”

  A moment while Hannity considered this, her look a little vacant, then she said, “Huh, no, I hadn’t. Huh … D’you know something I don’t?”

  “We don’t know anything.”

  “Just like the fucking polis … Aye, well, no, never thought of that before,” she said, then she shrugged. “I mean, good luck to him if he did, ‘cause when he went up there I was shagging Big Del from the Newton.” She laughed, and added, “Actually, I shagged him sometimes when Moyesy was out fishing ‘n’ all. You know why they call him Big Del?”

  “Is there anything you can tell us about Dirk?” asked Pereira, who had turned away again and was looking back out the window. “Anything at all, however trivial.”

  A moment, then Pereira turned to look at her, which seemed to be what she was waiting for.

  “Moyesy called him a cheating, lying cunt,” she said. “That the kind of thing you’re after?”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Nah. Just that he trusted him as far as he could throw him. Never one in wont of a cliché, our Moyesy, eh, Dom? Anyway, dead now.”

  “Can we have a look at his stuff?” asked Bain.

  “What d’you want to do that for?”

  “To see if there’s anything that might give us a clue as to why someone would want to kill him,” said Bain, mundanely.

  “Oh. Suppose. Come with me, I’ll take you into the next room. He spent most of his life in there. Don’t you move, Dom. You want lunch when the polis have gone?”

  *

  “What was the phone call, by the way?” asked Bain.

  They were in a small room, a dirty window looking out onto the sidewall of the house next door. The walls of the room were painted dark maroon, but largely covered in pictures, and posters for movies and computer games. Resident Evil — Apocalypse, Call of Duty 5, The Conjuring, Battlefield 2, A Clockwork Orange. There were also pictures of actresses taken from magazines, and a few naked women. One wall was dominated by a television with a sixty-inch screen.

  There was an Xbox, a Playstation 4, and a Nintendo Switch, a Sky box and a DVD player. There was no unit to house the consoles, and they lay on the floor, their wires stretched up to the back of the TV. Games, handsets and DVDs littered the carpet. There were at least ten handsets, and well over a hundred DVDs and games.

  Against the wall opposite the TV there was a two-seat sofa. There were a couple of porn mags, and a copy of a three-month old Four-Four-Two. There was an empty box of tissues on the floor by the sofa.

  At first glance, there really wasn’t going to be much to find. There were no drawers or cupboards, nowhere to stash anything away. They were both kneeling on the floor, quickly looking through the selection of DVDs.

  “It’s not looking good for the MPP connection,” she said. “Well, it’s looking good for them, not for us, as we t
ry to put a case together.”

  “The meat wasn’t processed at the factory?”

  “No evidence of it so far, though they’re not done.”

  “Hmm,” said Bain. “Yet, we have Dirk.”

  “Yes.”

  “Complete coincidence, or do we think then that the products were packaged elsewhere, and then inserted into the distribution system before they arrived at MeatLux?”

  “That’s what I’m sitting here thinking about,” said Pereira, as she placed the box for Horizon: Zero Dawn at the top of the neat pile she was making. “The chances of coincidence on this scale seem pretty remote. We need to consider the complexity, and the process of them being inserted into the system, and how that would work.”

  “We should head back to Cumbernauld,” said Bain, with neither apathy nor enthusiasm.

  “Yep,” said Pereira. “I should call Cooper and let him know where we’re at. I’ll do it when we’re on the ferry. Talking of which, we should get go–”

  “Oh, hello,” said Bain, and Pereira looked over.

  He was looking at the cover of a DVD, which he studied for a little longer, and then passed over to Pereira.

  The DVD was entitled Cum Shot Babe 7, and on the cover was a young woman, her legs spread, her hands on her breasts, forcing them up to enhance her cleavage. She was naked, but there was a blue star with the caption “Red hot action” placed over her vagina.

  Pereira took the box from Bain, then turned it over and looked at the back. There were pictures of a few other naked people, none of whom she recognised. She studied it for the moment, and handed it back to Bain with a raised eyebrow.

  “Did you see the name of the production company?” she asked.

  He turned the box round and looked at the back. In small print at the bottom it stated: ©2016 Packaged Meat Ltd.

  “Jesus,” said Bain. “Well, that’s telling it how it is, isn’t it?”

  “You think?” said Pereira. “Right, we know what we’re looking for. Any more movies produced by that company, and any more with our innocent girl here on the cover.”

  “Maybe Chantelle really is having sex with thirty guys a month like she said,” said Bain.