Primal Cut

by Ed O'Connor

  Voices floated down the hallway; she closed the book and replaced it on the counter. The Garrods had returned.

  ‘Here’s the police lady, Ray,’ Bartholomew said, suddenly overcome with nervous politeness, ‘Miss Dexter. You answer her questions. Be a good lad now.’ Ray blinked uncertainly at Dexter.

  ‘Ray, did you know Brian Patterson?’ she asked. ‘He was a porter at Smithfield.’

  Unsure, Ray turned to his brother. ‘Honnable lady, I didn’t know Mister Brian Patterson, the porter.’

  ‘What did he call me?’ Dexter asked.

  Bartholomew put his hand on Ray’s shoulder. ‘He called you the honourable lady. Ray’s not very good with names. When he forgets them he gets himself angry, don’t you, mate? Our Dad had the idea of using terms like they use in Parliament. You know, honourable lady, honourable gentleman, and all that stuff. That way he doesn’t make himself upset or annoy anyone else.’

  ‘Has he got a mental problem?’ Dexter asked with deliberate tactlessness.

  Bartholomew was struggling to keep calm. ‘He hasn’t got a mental problem. Our Dad used to keep motorbikes. He stripped the engines, refitted them and then flogged ’em. He’d do it in the house when it was raining. When Ray was a baby, our mum was carrying him down the stairs. She slipped on the carpet and Ray fell. He smashed his head on the engine casing of an old Triumph.’

  ‘Ah fell ten feet apparently,’ Ray nodded.

  ‘So he hasn’t got any mental problem, it just takes him a bit longer to get things.’

  ‘Ah ain’t got no mental problem,’ Ray shouted angrily. ‘Ah ain’t mental. Tell her, Bollamew.’

  Dexter felt a mixture of fear and pity. She also felt something else: a bell was jangling in the back of her mind. She felt excited.

  ‘What was that song you were singing, Ray?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The song you were singing just now. You were really good.’

  ‘Do you think so? Bollamew hates my singing. Don’t you, Bollamew?’

  Bartholomew Garrod forced a smile. He didn’t take his eyes off Dexter. Her question had unsettled him: he couldn’t decipher its purpose. His fingers clenched around the handle of his favourite cutting knife behind the counter. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Ray.’

  ‘The honnable lady liked my singing, she said so.’

  ‘It was great, Ray. What was the song?’ Dexter pressed.

  ‘“Blaydon Races”,’ Ray said excitedly. ‘Shall I sing it again?’

  Dexter’s heart raced as she realised that Ray Garrod might have inadvertently incriminated himself. She looked Bartholomew Garrod directly in the eye and smiled, ‘I don’t think so. But thank you very much. Thank you both for being so helpful. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’

  The two brothers stood in silence as she left the shop. Bartholomew had been unnerved by Dexter’s strange line of questioning. Had he underestimated her? Why had she asked Ray about the song? Twice? She had really wanted to know. Garrod wracked his brains for an answer.

  ‘Where did you learn that song, Ray?’ he asked.

  ‘What song?’

  ‘The fucking “Blaydon Races”. The fucking song she was just asking you about.’

  ‘Don’t shout at me!’ Ray screamed covering his ears. ‘The honnable gennelman mustn’t shout at me. Dad said you mustn’t never shout at me.’

  ‘Was it Brian? You’ve got to tell.’ Bartholomew shook his brother violently. ‘Brian the porter, did he teach you the song?’

  Ray nodded, tears running down his face.

  Bartholomew Garrod smashed his fist on the meat counter. ‘Fuck! Fucking hell, Ray! What have you done? You fucking stupid bastard.’ Shaking with rage, Bartholomew Garrod frantically tried to arrange his thoughts. Dexter had made the connection. He had seen that in her eyes. They had lied to her about not knowing Brian Patterson and she had clearly recognised that. The bitch would return with a search warrant. Bartholomew Garrod felt time slipping away from him.

  They had to move quickly. ‘Ray, listen to me. We have got to go away now. We’re going up to the caravan. Remember the old caravan up by the sea?’

  ‘On holiday?’ Ray had stopped crying.

  ‘That’s right, mate. Holiday. Listen, I have to go out now. I have to go out and get some money. Do you understand me, Ray?’

  ‘Yes, Bollamew,’ Ray nodded.

  ‘Lock up the shop after me. Don’t let anyone in. No one comes through that door except me.’ Bartholomew pulled his overcoat off its hook at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m going up to the bank in the High Road. I’ll be half an hour. Wait here for me, Ray. Don’t let anyone in.’

  ‘Yes, Bollamew.’

  Bartholomew Garrod slammed the door shut behind him and waited for Ray to fix the bolt after him. It was starting to rain. He walked as quickly as his heavy frame would allow.

  18.

  Tuesday, 15th October 2002

  Underwood sat glumly in his glass-walled office, trying to read the full post-mortem report on Leonard ‘Lefty’ Shaw. In his vainer moments, he had once liked to think of himself as a tragic hero: an essentially noble but flawed character. True he had endured his moments of catharsis; his marriage had foundered and his sanity had nearly slipped away from him. Now he felt a curious sense of nothing: nothing except the dull ache that was growing inside him. It was a strange form of redemption: to salvage hope and sanity only to be consumed from within by some evil malignancy. Heroes didn’t get cancer. Ordinary people got cancer: it was an ordinary little disease; an ordinary little lump. It was mundane, tragic in its predictability. Underwood didn’t know whether to fight. Perhaps redemption would come for him in death. Or, he reasoned, perhaps it would come in a noble struggle against it. He wondered if the rest really was silence, and if so, whether silence was such a bad thing.

  He turned his attention to the matter of Lefty Shaw’s inauspicious death.

  Name: Leonard Arthur Shaw. Age: 38 years 2 months. Weight: 134 Kilos.

  Underwood passed over Shaw’s other personal details with the recklessness of the jaded copper.

  Time of death: Sunday 12th October at approx 2 a.m. Cause of death: Damage to rear of head resulting in fractured skull and brain damage.

  ‘Foul play,’ thought Underwood. There was a time, earlier in his career and long before the arrival of Alison Dexter, when the prospect of a murder investigation would have excited him. Now it was just something to do. He had lost his sense of revulsion, his sense of justice even. Underwood wondered when this transition had taken place; when this emotional shell had hardened around him. Perhaps there hadn’t been a moment of transition. Maybe time had ground him down like waves grind rocks into sand. That was a more frightening thought.

  The surface of Shaw’s body was caked in dried sweat. Obviously, this suggests he undertook serious physical exertion before death. It should be noted that Shaw’s blood group was O negative. However, traces of AB negative blood were found on his hands, arms and face. My supposition is that Shaw was involved in some kind of fight before he died. This hypothesis is supported by the severe bruising to the victim’s ribcage.

  Underwood sipped his coffee, drowning his anxiety in hot, brown water. He tried to focus his mind. His thought processes, always erratic, were at their most unreliable in the morning.

  The victim’s right arm also shows an extremely unusual pattern of damage. A portion of flesh has been torn away and is missing. The victim appears to have had a tattoo of an eagle in the upper arm area. It is a common design. It appears that there was some crude attempt to remove it by force.

  Underwood looked out of the grey window at the grey skies above his grey world. Why try to remove the tattoo? Did it reveal something about the killer’s identity? He looked up as Alison Dexter arrived in the next office to his. Underwood looked up at the office clock. It said 8.02. He wrote that piece of information down in the notebook in which he noted such details. Dexter sat down and flicked on
her computer. Underwood studied her black hair and elegant neck intensely, with the hunger of desolation.

  He continued to read Leach’s report: The wound to the upper arm is, in itself, peculiar. The flesh is torn and ragged resembling the kind of damage inflicted by dangerous dogs. However, an enzyme analysis of the area revealed traces of human saliva on the flesh. This matched the AB negative blood traces found on the victim’s hands. The obvious conclusion is that Shaw’s assailant removed the flesh with his teeth.

  A warning bell jangled in Underwood’s head. In the gloomy recesses of his mind, something was screaming at him. Edgy now, he read on:

  The actual killing blows were struck with tremendous ferocity. Splinters of steel were lodged in the victim’s skin and hair. The cranium was fractured an inch above the nuchal crest, fatally piercing the brain itself in two places.

  Something vague and indistinct bothered Underwood. A memory frantically gasping for life: like some prehistoric creature crawling out of the primordial soup.

  The post-mortem evidence points to a rather obvious conclusion: Shaw was engaged in some form of physical violence immediately prior to his death. His assailant is of the AB negative blood group and, in addition to administering the fatal blows to Shaw with some kind of heavy steel instrument (hammer?), he bit a sizeable chunk of flesh from Shaw’s right arm. Without question, Shaw was dead before his body was dumped onto the railway track.

  Underwood sat back in his chair and for a moment or two watched Alison Dexter stare into space in the office next to him.

  The computer screen glowed in front of her, waiting for her to log in. Alison Dexter was aware of the faint musky aroma on her face and her fingers. She thought that she liked it. However, everything else was uncertain: her feelings ricocheted between shame, pride and excitement. The thrill and terror of losing control electrified her. She now knew that she was alive but had no idea what she was becoming. She groaned inwardly as Underwood came to her door.

  ‘Got a minute?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Dexter waved him in.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You seem…’

  ‘Fine,’ Dexter crashed the sarcophagus lid shut on that twitching corpse of a conversation. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Underwood handed her the post-mortem report on Lefty Shaw. ‘This is Leach’s PM analysis of the railway body, Leonard Shaw.’

  ‘Foul play?’

  ‘So it seems. It also appears that there’s an overlap with the work Bevan’s been doing.’

  ‘The dog-fighting thing?’

  ‘That’s right. Shaw attended one of the fights at Woollard’s farm. Bevan got his car number. Bevan’s helping out on this. I hope that’s OK with you.’

  ‘How did he die?’ Dexter didn’t feel alert enough to tackle a full post-mortem report.

  ‘Back of his head was bashed in. Chunk of flesh was torn off his arm too. I’m wondering if it was a prize fight.’

  ‘Are you happy to run with it?’ Dexter offered the report back to Underwood without opening it.

  He didn’t accept it. ‘Delighted to but you should read it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel right. I’m afraid I might have missed something important.’

  ‘Leave it on the desk then. I’ll look at it.’

  Conversation over. Underwood tried to find a spark of interest in Dexter’s stone green eyes; the spark that usually ignited his day. For once, he saw nothing and, deflated, left the room without another word. Dexter felt a wrench of guilt: professional guilt this time. She tapped her password into her computer and opened Microsoft Outlook. Kelsi had written her mobile number and email address in Dexter’s notebook. Dexter dangled over a precipice of uncertainty. She felt like a cartoon character who had run off the edge of a cliff and stopped dead in the air; its legs still running uselessly. Was it bad form to send an email message so soon? Was it bad form not to? She didn’t want Kelsi to think that she was an obsessive maniac: the poor girl had, after all, already spotted Dexter lurking in her company car park. Perhaps, Dexter reasoned, that was precisely why she should send a message; to reassure Kelsi that she was not a basket case.

  Irritated at the impossibility of sexual diplomacy, Dexter cursed herself. This was exactly the kind of distraction that she had battled studiously for years to avoid. Her normal lattice of logical thought was fragmenting by the second; like a child tearing down a spider’s web. And yet, she felt impelled to write to Kelsi. The simple truth was, she wanted more.

  To: HensyAK@ComBoldUK.Net

  From: Adex@CamCpol.Org

  Hello, just a quick note to say thanks for a great evening. Sorry about the car park thing: coppers are naturally suspicious. Legs ache like mad: football is not a forgiving game especially for us flat-foots. Would love to have a drink sometime. Drop me a line when you get a moment. Alison.

  Satisfied, Dexter sent the message. She liked the mixture of sensitivity and assertiveness. She had expressed interest without cloying; terse but friendly. That was the balance that she had wanted to strike. Instantly bored once the message had disappeared, Dexter opened Leach’s post-mortem report on Leonard Shaw.

  Ten minutes later, her mood had suddenly changed. In a mild panic exacerbated by her fragile emotional state, she called Roger Leach and requested a full DNA profile of the AB negative blood found on Leonard Shaw’s body. Then she called Leyton CID and requested that a copy of the Primal Cut case file be immediately couriered up to her. A demon had stepped from the shadows at the back of her tired mind.

  19.

  Leyton, East London December 1995

  DS Dexter ran up two flights of stone stairs, brushing past cleaning ladies and uniformed officers on the way. She burst through the double doors of Leyton CID and headed straight for McInally’s office. The DCI was staring at crime scene photographs of the body hauled from the Lea and of the remains of Brian Patterson. He looked up in surprise as Dexter crashed through his door without knocking.

  ‘Is the building on fire?’ he asked.

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘It’s polite to knock.’

  ‘Sir, it’s important. I think I’ve found something. Something about the Patterson case. There are these two brothers. They’re butchers on Norlington and they…’

  McInally sat back in his chair and raised a heavy hand. ‘Dexy, sit down, count to ten and talk me through it slowly.’

  Annoyed, breathless but compliant, Dexter took a grip of her emotions and walked McInally through her two meetings with the Garrods. Her boss was thoughtful.

  ‘It’s all circumstantial of course,’ he observed. ‘How certain are you it’s them? If we go charging in with a search warrant, we need to be confident.’

  Dexter bit her thumb, the pain sometimes helped her concentrate. Then she saw the photographs spread out across McInally’s desk. She focused on the bloodied torso and arms.

  ‘Sir, in both cases pieces of flesh were removed from the victims. We thought the attacks were frenzied. I’m telling you that they were thought out. Look at the damage to the River Lea body: sections of flesh removed from the shoulders and ribcage. Patterson was cut up in a similar way. These are not accidental, sir, they are butchers’ cuts of meat: the primal cuts. I fucking saw them in a book in the Garrods’ shop.’

  McInally looked at her. ‘Show me these primal cuts then.’

  Dexter sensed she was winning. ‘Can I use your computer?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Dexter sat behind McInally’s PC and logged onto the Internet. She ran a search for ‘Primal Cut’. Eventually she found a picture of a beef carcass annotated with the various cuts. McInally leaned forward. Dexter picked up a photograph of the River Lea torso.

  ‘OK. Look at the shoulder’s missing portion of flesh. Look at the diagram; that area is called the “chuck tender”. Look at the back of the victim. Missing flesh here. Look at the diagram; that area is called “stripl
oin”. On the Patterson body flesh was removed from the back of his upper right thigh. On the diagram that cut is called “silverside”. Guv, only a butcher would know the primal cuts.’

  She sensed that McInally was on the point of being persuaded. He needed a final shove in the direction of her thought process.

  ‘There’s something else, sir,’ she continued. ‘The Garrods knew Patterson. I’m sure of it. When I asked them they claimed they’d never met him. Brian Patterson’s mates told me that he used to sing the “Blaydon Races” while he worked. Ray Garrod was singing the same song today. They knew Patterson, sir. They knew him and they lied about it. Why would they do that?’

  ‘Go on,’ McInally encouraged.

  Dexter hesitated. There wasn’t much else to add. Her assumption of the Garrods’ guilt had been based on some fairly flimsy ideas. There had to be something else they could use.

  ‘The River Lea corpse was a large man, right? Muscular, heavy set.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He could defend himself. You’d need two people to take him down. The Garrods are both powerful men.’

  ‘Dexy…’

  ‘Then there’s the head wound,’ she continued. ‘Didn’t the PM report say that the fatal wound was a massive blow to the centre of the forehead? Like a poleaxe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a way of stunning cattle, Guv, before you slaughter them. A butcher would know that.’

  ‘Alison, I trust you,’ McInally said quietly. ‘And you are a fucking good copper. But you do realise that if we go marching in there and find nothing there’ll be hell to pay. Someone will swing and I don’t dangle alone.’