Primal Cut

by Ed O'Connor

  Underwood thought for a moment, then looked again at the picture of Keith Gwynne. ‘He’s the weak link. Gwynne is small time and not that intelligent. He is not a proper crook. We could pull him in and put the frighteners on him.’

  ‘We’d have nothing concrete to work with. As soon as we let him out he’d be on the phone to Woollard and we’d have no chance of a result.’ Bevan thought for a second. ‘What other pies does Gwynne have his fingers in?’

  Underwood shrugged. ‘You name it. He does up old cars and flogs them. He used to drive around in a beaten up 1950s ambulance. Like I said, he’s a chancer.’

  ‘You said he was a gypsy?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Bevan scratched his head. ‘Does he have ponies? Most of them do.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Let’s check. If he does, I might have a way to get closer to him. I might need you to let me have a couple of plods for the day though.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem. Now we’ve put this Braun character away, there should be some uniforms about who’d fancy hassling a pikey.’

  ‘Good. I will drive up to Balehurst and have a look around. I’ll try to become a familiar face.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll sort you two uniformed officers. How much can I tell them?’

  ‘Bare minimum.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Bevan got up from the table and shook Underwood’s hand. ‘I appreciate your help, John.’

  ‘To be honest, Mike, I’m happy to be involved. They don’t give me anything substantial to work with these days.’

  ‘The famous Inspector Dexter?’

  ‘I’m flapping in her slipstream.’

  ‘I’ve heard a bit about her. She was at the Met before? A bit of a ball breaker.’

  Underwood smiled at the description, imagining Dexter’s volcanic reaction if she had heard Bevan’s comment. ‘A victim of her own success,’ he observed.

  ‘I’ll tread carefully,’ Bevan winked at Underwood as he left the room.

  Underwood suddenly felt bad for bantering about Dexter. She was too obvious a target for his frustration. That his protégée had outstripped him was disconcerting but, like Twain’s self-made man, he had no one but himself to blame for his own lack of success. He looked out of the window at the scrappy station garden: a pool of light in the darkness.

  The birds had gone.

  8.

  Alison Dexter’s interview with Suzy James was screened on the BBC local news that night. Kelsi Hensy started with surprise as the image of her new football recruit appeared in front of her. She stopped eating her tea and listened much more carefully to the news than was her custom. Dexter looked uneasy in front of the camera, she thought; pretty though. Kelsi watched intently as the camera trailed Dexter’s footsteps to her car. The screen then filled with the grim visage of Henry Braun whose large yellow teeth certainly weren’t pretty.

  ‘This is a miscarriage of justice,’ Henry Braun snarled into the camera. ‘My brother has been the victim of a witch-hunt by New Bolden CID. The behaviour of Inspector Dexter and her team has been a disgrace. They are arrogant bullies. An innocent man has been convicted today.’

  In a different part of Cambridgeshire, in his squalid room piled high with newspapers and smelling of dog food, George Norlington watched the news too.

  9.

  Friday, 11th October 2002

  At 11.15 a.m. the following morning, Nicholas Braun was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment for three rapes and a string of indecent assaults. In the back of the crowded courtroom, Dexter clenched her right hand in triumph. The sentence had justified her efforts. After a moment’s thought, she felt a terrible twist of guilt. Twelve years would mean little to Braun’s victims: the women whose lives he had ruined. Dexter wondered how she had become so de-sensitised. Previously, she might have blamed her own brutal, lonely upbringing but over time had become bored with self-pity. Perhaps the job itself was hammering her emotions out of shape. She remembered how it had almost destroyed John Underwood. Maybe now her own personality was being re-fashioned. Dexter was uncertain of what she was changing into. The idea disturbed her.

  She drove back to New Bolden police station in a curious mental state, for once forgetting her plans for the day. Her mind was focused on Kelsi Hensy and on the confusion of emotions that she engendered. Dexter was sliding. She had always tried to channel emotion, to dam it and draw intellectual energy from its controlled flow. And yet, that strategy had not worked: she was alone. Her appetite for information was her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She needed it like some addictive drug. All her decisions were based on a cold evaluation of information. Dexter decided that she needed to know more about Kelsi Hensy.

  Returning to New Bolden CID, Dexter nodded at John Underwood through the glass wall that separated their offices. She found the transparency intrusive and angled her computer screen away from Underwood’s gaze. She logged in and, after a moment’s delay while her system rebooted, accessed the Cambridgeshire police online records. Within a couple of minutes she had ascertained that no one called Kelsi Hensy possessed a criminal record.

  Ashamed of herself, but driven on, Dexter tried an alternative but more obvious source of information. She ran an Internet search using ‘Kelsi Hensy’ as a search descriptor.

  It produced twenty-seven search results. Dexter scanned through the list, her eyes eventually coming to rest on a headline from a computer trade magazine: ‘ComBold appoints new Head of Communications’. Dexter double-clicked on the article and read carefully as it appeared on her screen.

  ‘Cambridgeshire-based Internet security firm ComBold have appointed Kelsi Hensy, 34, as Director of Communications. This is an internal appointment. Ms Hensy previously worked in a junior capacity within the Communications Department.’

  Dexter scrolled down the page. There was a small photograph of Kelsi Hensy sitting in her new office at ComBold next to her contact details. Dexter wrote them down on her blotter. There was a knock at her door; without looking up she quickly closed down her Internet connection and Kelsi Hensy’s smiling face disappeared from her screen. When she looked up, Underwood was already in her office.

  ‘Good result today then,’ he ventured.

  ‘Very. Good riddance to that toerag,’ Dexter smiled back.

  Underwood sensed guilt. Dexter never smiled. He decided to let it go. ‘I met with Mike Bevan yesterday.’

  ‘Is he making progress?’

  ‘Of sorts. He’s asked for some resources.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Now Underwood was convinced that something was wrong. Dexter was fiercely protective of her departmental resources and yet she hadn’t even queried his statement. He had been observing Dexter’s personal life from a distance. He liked to think of it as taking an invisible responsibility for her. The bitter truth was he had nothing else to fill his dark imagination. Something had clearly upset her: he would endeavour to find out more.

  10.

  Leyton, East London

  December 1995

  To his surprise, Alan Moran found that he was still alive. He was aware of the cold first, his right side felt like stone. Then he remembered the pain. He was standing in the dark; leaning against what felt like a refrigerator wall. His unusual circumstances disorientated him. He tried to move but found that the pressure around his neck was being caused by some kind of leather strap – like a collar.

  His eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness. A rope led from his collar upwards, disappearing into blackness. His hands were tied behind him. Alan resisted the urge to panic. He was ex-army. He tried to keep a cool head. His memories of the previous evening were scattered in the jumble of his semi-conscious brain. The nightclub had shut at two. He’d had a quick drink with a few of the other bouncers then walked down Church Road to the junction with Leyton High Road. He’d turned left up towards Midland Road Station. He remembered going under the rail bridge and smelling the stale piss of Leyton�
��s tramps; he recalled the sound of a car door slamming. He had crossed the High Road and headed towards his flat in Abbots Park Road. There the trail of memories ended.

  He wondered if he had offended someone important. Smashed up some little wanker outside the club without realising his importance. The East End had changed beyond recognition in his lifetime but there were still some toes you didn’t tread on. Had he battered some relative of the Cowans’? Or the Moules’? Was this payback time? Alan strained against his bindings.

  Suddenly, a terrible high-pitched screaming started outside the room. The noise intensified and was punctuated by the sound of a fist crashing against a steel door. Then Alan heard another voice: a man, remonstrative, half-threatening. The screaming suddenly stopped. A bolt slid back on the refrigerator door. The room was suddenly filled with electric light.

  Ray Garrod ran straight up to Moran, jumping up and down in excitement.

  ‘Give me the pen, Bollamew. Lemmee do the pen. You promised me.’

  Alan Moran looked at the huge figure of Bartholomew Garrod standing in the doorway.

  ‘Listen, mate,’ he gasped against his collar, ‘there’s been some misunderstanding.’

  Bartholomew stepped towards him. In close up, Alan half-recognised the huge, rutted face as it stared impassively back at him.

  ‘I don’t know who you work for but I’ve done nothing.’ Alan now saw that he was in a huge refrigerator. Sides of beef and pork hung in neat lines next to him. There were sausages, chops and steaks on shelves around him.

  Bartholomew Garrod didn’t say anything. He handed his brother a permanent marker pen, taking care to remove the cap because he knew it posed problems for Ray. Scarcely able to contain his excitement, Ray Garrod grabbed Alan’s head with his left hand. With his right he drew two diagonal lines across Alan’s forehead. They intersected directly in the centre. Bartholomew watched his brother’s careful artwork. Moran’s crossed forehead now reminded him of the Scottish flag.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Moran spluttered in surprise and fear. He had done a tour in Northern Ireland. He had heard stories about what IRA snatch squads had done to Squaddies. He didn’t want to lose an eye or his kneecaps or his bollocks.

  Bartholomew Garrod brought up the poleaxe that he held in his right hand. It had a steel head fixed on a wooden shaft. The steel had been sharpened to a point. Bartholomew rested the point of the axe head on the intersection made by the lines on Moran’s forehead.

  ‘This won’t hurt much. There are no nerves in your brain.’

  With that, he drove the sharpened axe head straight through Moran’s forehead. He held it in position for a few seconds, maybe ten, until the body eventually relaxed. Ray Garrod clapped happily as blood plopped gratifyingly onto the stone floor.

  ‘That was an old-fashioned “stunning”, Ray. We used a poleaxe but they have bolt guns for that now.’ Bartholomew felt the impressive muscle bulk of Alan Moran’s twitching body.

  ‘A bolt gun?’

  ‘That’s right. They make a hole with the gun. But sometimes they have to pith it.’

  ‘Pith it?’

  ‘Yep. They feed a metal stick into the hole and scratch up the brains a bit. To make sure the animal is dead.’ Bartholomew looked around for one of his meat knives. ‘Now we have to bleed it you see. Blood has bad stuff in it so we drain that out then the meat will keep longer.’

  Bartholomew Garrod made a vicious incision across the front of Moran’s neck below his collar. The body was hanging forward in its harness and it began to haemorrhage impressively. Bartholomew slid a steel bucket under the blood flow to collect it.

  ‘Blood’s not all bad though, is it Ray?’

  Ray was staring at the filling bucket. ‘Why’s that, Bollamew?’

  ‘Well, we can make bread with it, can’t we?’

  ‘Blood bread.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bartholomew said. ‘Seven parts rye flour, three parts blood. Very tasty it is too.’

  ‘And black pudding, Bollamew, don’t forget that.’

  ‘We could make some blood sausage if you like.’

  Bartholomew knew that the organs had to be removed in a specific order before he could remove the primal cuts. He would need to consult his ‘Handbook of Meat’ for that information. He had decided to use the procedure for cattle: swine slaughter was altogether more complicated.

  He checked his watch. He had two hours before he had to collect the day’s stock from Smithfield. They could dump the remains on the way there.

  Just beyond Bow Industrial Park is a deserted scrap of land where the River Lea narrows. There’s a bridge that crosses the river, leading out onto Dace Road. The Garrods parked their butcher’s van on that bridge at 5.30 a.m. It was a desolate spot, bitterly exposed to the winds raking across Stratford Marsh. A council notice fluttered on a broken streetlight. The noise was unsettling to Bartholomew Garrod. While Ray slept in the passenger seat of the van, exhausted by the night’s excitement and weighed down with a heavy meal, Bartholomew hauled two dustbin bags full of Alan Moran from the back of his van. With an effort he heaved them, one by one, off the edge of the bridge. They splashed and sank without trace into the filthy water.

  Bartholomew paused to regain his composure. His hot breath twisted in front of him. The notice still fluttered. He ignored its irritating rattle and climbed back inside his van. He would be a little bit late for his Smithfield pick up; perhaps if he gunned the engine and got lucky with the traffic, he could make up time.

  Apparently meaningless moments can have disproportionate effects. An extra ten minutes in bed might make you run over the child you would otherwise have missed; reading your partner’s emails might make you want to murder someone you’ve never met; watching a television programme might save your life.

  Bartholomew Garrod made a mistake at 5.31 a.m. on the morning of 7th December 1995. He didn’t read a council notice. The notice said that, as part of an urban regeneration project, the River Lea was to be cleaned from Walthamstow Marshes to Bow. Old oil drums, supermarket trolleys and other rubbish would all be hauled from the river’s murky depths in an attempt to revitalise it. Work was to start on the Leyton stretch at 9.00 a.m. on the 10th December.

  It was a tiny mistake that was to have disproportionate consequences for the Garrods and for the then Detective Sergeant Alison Dexter.

  11.

  Saturday, 12th October 2002

  The ring was set up. Woollard had put down a new circle of old carpet. There was a smaller group of punters than normal. Woollard had marketed the evening as something of a special event. He didn’t want anyone there that he didn’t trust.

  Norlington led in his Tosa from the car. It was a large animal, about 150 pounds, well fed and powerful. The dog stayed close to him, uncertain at the strange faces and unfamiliar smells.

  ‘He looks like a game animal,’ Woollard said with a smile, ‘good bones.’

  ‘He’s a strong dog,’ Norlington replied. ‘You’ve fought him a lot before?’

  ‘A couple of times. Essex.’

  Keith Gwynne had joined them. ‘I see you’ve been introduced. Fuck me! That’s a big dog!’

  The dog stared blackly at Gwynne. Norlington gently massaged the dog’s muscular neck to keep him calm.

  ‘Hard to find Tosa fights these days,’ Woollard observed. ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘I call him Tyndall.’

  ‘Weird name. Where’d you get him?’ Woollard asked. ‘You can’t import them now.’

  ‘I won him in a fight out at Clacton about two years ago. I put his owner in hospital,’ Norlington replied.

  ‘If you fought him in Essex you must have come across Jack Whiteside. He fought Tosas out of Maldon.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve met him.’

  ‘He was a top man Jack. He died just after millennium night. Some toerag cut his throat. Can you believe that?’

  ‘I haven’t heard of him. I would have remembered that. When are we weig
hing the dogs?’

  Woollard exchanged a glance with Gwynne. ‘Didn’t Keith tell you? We’re not bothering with a weigh-in?’

  ‘Then we don’t fight. The rules say there has to be a weigh-in.’ Norlington was unhappy at the flouting of this convention.

  ‘Look, my dog’s a little heavier than yours. So what? I’m not daft. Your dog is more experienced. He’s got scars and white fur all over his face. That means he’s seen a lot of action. My dog is a first timer. It all evens out,’ Woollard insisted. ‘It’ll be like a “game test” to see if he’s got a future in the pit.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Norlington angrily, ‘I’ve been fucking set up.’

  ‘Look,’ Woollard responded, ‘I’ll up the purse for the bare knuckle by two hundred notes. Seventeen hundred quid! It’s easy money. These people have paid good money. Tosa fights are a special attraction. Don’t let me down, George, I was told you were a man of your word.’

  Norlington thought for a second. ‘Seventeen hundred then. Don’t bend any other rules either.’

  Woollard nodded. He looked Norlington over, studying his fearsome hands and battered face. ‘We’ll do the bare knuckle straight after. Big Lefty fancies his chances.’

  Norlington nodded. ‘Shall we get on with this then?’

  ‘Take him into the ring now, Kev!’ Woollard boomed to one of his farm lads. ‘Go and fetch Karl in.’

  Norlington took Tyndall into the arena. The dog’s claws scratched against the carpet. In one or two places, Norlington noticed that the carpets had been torn up: through the gaps he could see the exposed and unforgiving concrete floor. Tyndall was beginning to get agitated, sensing what was about to come. Norlington whispered quietly into the dog’s ear as they waited.

  A moment or two later, Kev returned with Tyndall’s opposition. Immediately, Norlington knew that the fight was lost. Woollard’s Tosa was enormous: at least thirty pounds heavier than Tyndall. It was a no-contest. The other dog had huge, unnatural muscle bulk about its shoulders. It was mean too. Norlington recognised the hard fury in its eyes. The two animals clocked each other and began to snarl aggressively. Norlington struggled to hold his dog steady as Woollard’s animal was brought into the ring.