by Andrew Lowe
Sawyer drove past the building and noted the sign out front: KOTECHA HOUSE. He pushed on, up and around the spiralling road to the viewpoint car park and the widescreen sweep of the Hope Valley and Padley Gorge beyond.
He killed the engine and made a call. It rang for a long time before connecting.
‘If you’re too busy to talk,’ said Sawyer.
Walker kept his voice low. ‘Lots going on here. I was going to call you, actually.’
‘First thing, though. Can you get me a clear address for Stuart Sutton? I saw him go into a block near Hathersage. Kotecha House. Might be a mate or a girlfriend’s place, but if he’s on the census you should be able to dig him out.’
‘Okay. Did you meet him?’
‘Yeah. He’s holding something back, but I don’t want to push too hard now.’
A door closing at Walker’s end. ‘Sir. DS Shepherd called me in, with Keating. They told me I should avoid all contact with you.’
‘So, that’s going well. Did they say why?’
‘Something to do with compromising the suspension case.’
Sawyer screwed his eyes shut. ‘What were you going to call me about?’
‘Scott Walton. I tracked his movements after leaving ProPak Foods. Tax records show that he transferred to an abattoir, outside Hayfield.’
Sawyer’s eyes sprang open. ‘Sherratt & Sons?’
‘Yes. There was a meat industry awards event there in the mid-2000s. One of Walton’s line managers was commended for blowing the whistle on unsafe and unethical practices there in 2007. The place closed in 2009. Probably related to the investigation. I’ve got a contact for the whistle-blower. He works for a farming standards agency in Crosspool.’
Sawyer glanced at his rear-view mirror. ‘Send me the details. I’ll go and see him. I can be there within the hour.’
‘Trail goes a bit cold for Walton, so maybe he can help to pick it up. I can keep digging, but… Sir. If this transpires as a solid lead for the Hardwick and Bishop killings… I’m—’
‘Caught in the middle, yes. I’ll talk to the abattoir guy and feed back. I’ll also brief you on Bullmore. Don’t worry. I’ll use a burner. You can take it from there.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
He started the engine, dug into his pocket. ‘For now, though. Do what Shepherd says. Cut me off. Don’t contact me again. Cover yourself until the suspension thing blows over.’
Sawyer took out a small transparent bag filled with a grainy brown powder, lifted from Sutton. He turned it around in his fingers.
‘You think it’ll blow over?’
‘I’ll be okay.’
42
Sawyer fixed his eyes on the road ahead, and let the music drown his thoughts. An overlong playlist of nineties UK dance music: toytown rave, landfill trance, club bangers. Here on a dank autumnal afternoon, the soundtrack was florid and off-mood, but he needed something stifling, surrounding.
Eyes forward, away from the rear-view mirror.
In his periphery, the wide, open farm fields and dry-stone walls gave way to garden centres and golf clubs, as he descended through the Crosspool suburbs.
He found a parking space at a village square shopping parade and ducked out of the Mini, locking the door by pointing the transponder key over his shoulder, heading for a separate section of the mall that had been converted into cheap office space.
A chunky man in a short-sleeved shirt emerged from the office at the end of the row. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses and hitched a canvas satchel over his shoulder.
‘Hi,’ said Sawyer. ‘Trying to find the DFSA. Derbyshire Farming Standards Agency.’
The man nodded. ‘You’ve found it. Who are you after?’
‘Gary Holloway.’
‘You’re doing well. You’ve found him, too. I was just about to head home.’ Holloway tilted the sunglasses forward off his eyes, and looked Sawyer up and down. ‘Unsolicited visit. That’s never good.’
‘I’m a journalist. Lloyd Robbins. I was hoping you could spare a few minutes to talk about Sherratt & Sons.’
Holloway’s head gave a subtle jerk to the side; a nervous twitch. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, Mr Robbins, but I’m all talked out about that. Who do you work for?’
‘Myself. I’m writing a book about the people who work in food production, the meat industry. I wanted to get your thoughts on the culture of slaughterhouses, what needs to change.’
Holloway checked his watch.
‘I’m interested in issues surrounding the mental health of workers. I believe you were responsible for exposing unethical practice at Sherratt & Sons. As a central figure in the progression of the last ten or so years, it would be irresponsible of me to write a book that doesn’t take account of your experience.’
Holloway drew in a deep breath, held the moment. ‘Twenty minutes.’
Holloway pulled the blind over the window at the back of his office, muting the late afternoon sun. ‘Drink? Tea? Coffee? If you’re after stories, you might need something stronger.’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Sawyer took a seat in the rickety foldaway chair facing Holloway’s corner desk. The office was small and smelt of wet socks and cheap detergent. An open gym bag had been thrown into the corner. Holloway clearly favoured an uncluttered workspace: recent-looking desktop PC, a neat stack of wire mesh trays, no posters or pictures. ‘Nice place.’
Holloway laughed. He sat down and pivoted his chair towards Sawyer. ‘It’s okay, Mr Robbins. You’ve done the buttering up. It’s a dump, but it’s all about the work.’
‘How long were you at Sherratt & Sons?’
‘About ten years in total. I was in Quality Control, but I worked with the slaughtermen. Supervised a few.’
‘The slaughtermen?’
‘They do what it says on the tin, yeah. They’re killers. It’s horrible, dangerous work, and we are still not taking proper care of them. We like our meat, but we don’t want to know how it got onto the plate. These guys are the start of the process. We kill one hundred million animals for meat in this country every month.’
‘Every month?’
‘Yeah. Month, not year. Imagine that. One hundred million killer blows. Thousands of slaughtermen. Human beings, like you and me. This place isn’t going to win any awards for Workplace of the Year, but these guys, and they are all guys, have to work in filthy, dirty conditions. There’s animal shit on the floor. You see the guts, there’s blood all over the walls. And there’s nothing to describe the stink. It’s like a punch on the nose, the first time you smell it. And then it just clings to you, hanging in the air like a fucking soup. The stench of dead and dying animals. And there’s always a tang of iron in the air, from the blood. Even when you’re not in the preparation areas.’
‘And you came forward to expose the poor practices?’
‘I did. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, despite all the shit I got for it. I took secret film. Terrified sheep wriggling free from their restrainers before being chased and recaptured and slaughtered. I got footage of a sheep being killed on the blood-soaked floor, because the slaughterman couldn’t be bothered to get it back in the restraints. Unsafe equipment, unsanitary conditions. And no attention paid to the psychological effects. I used to have nightmares about the things I saw all day. Then I started to get mental health problems because of the way I’d trained myself to not feel anything.’
Sawyer glanced at the closed blind, again craving an open window.
Holloway caught his gaze. ‘Sorry it’s a bit stuffy in here. The window is fixed. Won’t open.’
‘What happened after all the investigation into your exposé?’
‘I put some distance between myself and the place. Went to Australia for a few weeks while it all calmed down. Luckily, it was in the days before social media. I couldn’t escape so easily these days, of course.’
‘Did you work with a man named Scott Walton?’
Holloway frowned, studying Sawyer. ‘I did, yes
. I was his manager in Quality Control. Haven’t heard that name in years. He came from ProPak, didn’t he? A lot of the slaughtermen came from processing factories. It’s like an apprenticeship.’
‘Desensitising.’
‘In a way, yes. Scott had a difficult start, as I remember. In life, I mean.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Abusive father, spent time in prison at a young age.’
‘He seemed like a decent bloke, but he never quite settled. It’s a very male culture. Everyone is terrified of showing weakness. There’s a lot of drinking, and weird things like addictions to energy drinks because many of the slaughtermen hold down multiple jobs. There’s a frequent turnover, but Scott stayed longer than most. Probably too long. There was a guy… Pat something. He worked with Scott. Topped himself. I kept an eye on Scott after that. Went for a few drinks with him. He told me that when he first started, some of the older blokes sent him into a storage room to fetch something, because they knew what was in there. A big skip full of cow’s heads, flayed for all the available meat, but with the eyeballs left, staring. They all found it hilarious, but he said he had nightmares for weeks after.’
‘What kind of work would Scott have to do on a daily basis?’
The sun squeezed through the blind, casting a strip of light across Sawyer’s eyes. He shifted his chair back into shade.
‘Restraining, stunning, killing. The bleeding can take hours. Then you have to get all the innards out, throw it together as contaminated waste. Barrels of guts hanging around. Then there’s de-skinning, de-furring. Dicing and bagging. It’s like a production line. They stun everything now, before killing. They used to use bolts through the brain, but they realised that the animals could sense what was coming and they’d get agitated. The worst thing is a stressed animal that knows it’s about to be slaughtered. Low lactic acid, ruins the meat.’ Holloway took a breath. ‘I remember one time, Scott went home early, sick. One of the other lads said he’d cut into a freshly killed cow and a fucking calf foetus had fallen out. Then there was BSE. That was apocalyptic.’
‘Mass killing?’
‘Yes. We had to go round to farms and kill many, many animals in one day, then burn the bodies. Scott missed that. But we often had to deal with cases where an animal had tested positive for TB, and they would bring whole families in to be culled. Bulls, heifers, calves. Probably the worst thing I’ve ever overseen was when we had to slaughter this group of five calves. Scott and a couple of others were trying to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so tiny and bony they skipped out and trotted around, all wobbly on their newborn legs. They were sniffing around us like puppies, because they were young and curious. I remember Scott stroking one, and it suckling his finger. And so, when the time came to kill them, it was unbelievably tough. Slaughterhouses are designed for killing large animals, and the stun boxes are the right size to hold a cow that weighs around a ton. But the calves only came around a quarter of the way up the box. We got them all in at once, then we killed them. Everyone stood around, staring at their bodies. Scott was sobbing his heart out.
‘There’s a thing they call perpetrator-induced traumatic syndrome. Basically, PTSD suffered by slaughterhouse workers. I became really worried about Scott after the calf killings. He just seemed to be drifting around the place. He started to talk about how he wasn’t going to be around for much longer.’
‘He wanted to leave?’
‘I took it as a lot darker than that. But then he changed, and said he was going to take action, to help animals.’
Sawyer realised his breathing had quickened again. He fought to slow it down. ‘He worked for animal charities.’
‘I believe he did, yes. Is he okay, Mr Robbins? You seem quite focused on Scott.’
‘He’s a strong candidate for a case study. For the book.’
Holloway paused, and regarded Sawyer with something close to suspicion. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any contact details for him. As I say, I haven’t seen him in years. They closed Sherratt & Sons in 2009 after the investigation. I attended an FSA hearing in 2010 and I heard that Scott had been given keyholder status by the place’s owners. Basically a glorified caretaker for a building where demolition isn’t feasible.’ He stood up and re-opened the blind. Sawyer squinted at the flare of light. ‘Anyway. I hope that’s been helpful. Please let me know if you need anything more from me. I’d be happy to help. I can give you contacts for some of the ex-Quality Control staff if you like. It might be worth trying to track Scott down and speak to him directly.’
Sawyer rose to his feet, in a daze. ‘I’ll certainly do that.’
43
Sawyer bowed his head as the lift lurched and began its descent to the basement level at Sheffield’s Northern General Teaching Hospital. He took out his phone and opened a new text message from Jordan Burns.
CALL ME THIS EVENING - URGENT
The lift car jostled against the walls of the shaft, and Sawyer sifted through his memories, nagged by a connection he couldn’t quite make: something standing plain and clear, but always just outside his vision.
He tugged open the inner security door and stepped out into the labyrinth of empty and unloved corridors. Not that the lack of adornment was an oversight; down here, the patients were past caring about peeling paint or obsolete signage.
As he passed the immense chemical storage room, the colours shifted from pastel to primary, and he followed the sound of a female voice into the refurbished lobby area: anonymous reception desk, unmarked side rooms, the sting of something acrid in the air. Holloway had spoken about the raw stench of animal death; here, the prevailing odour came from the materials that masked human decay, holding the bodies in a state of purgatory until every molecule of forensic worth had been extracted.
A young woman in crisp business dress spotted Sawyer and ended her phone call. She tapped something into her computer. ‘Detective Sawyer. How lovely to see you again.’
‘Gina. Is he around?’
She looked surprised. ‘Is that it? No small talk?’
Sawyer sighed. ‘Been anywhere nice on your holidays this year?’
Gina opened her mouth wide. ‘Oh! We did. Mykonos. Expensive, but such a beautiful place. Crystal blue sea. Lovely people. The sort of food you only eat in your dreams.’
‘Must be hard to come back here.’
She managed a thin smile. ‘The view’s not so good, but I enjoy the work. How about you? Have you managed some downtime since… all that business?’
‘Sawyer isn’t a downtime sort of guy.’ A voice from the corridor behind the reception desk: deep, sonorous, faint Glaswegian burr. Frazer Drummond stabbed at the control panel of a coffee machine. ‘To what do we owe the dubious pleasure?’
‘It’s not a social visit.’
Drummond gave an exaggerated toothsome grin. ‘That’s a shame. The people round here. Honestly. No personality. You have to do all the work, you know? And you get nothing back.’
He angled his head and walked into a side room, letting the pale green door close behind him with a slam. Sawyer followed. As he entered the tiny break room, Drummond set his coffee down on a central coffee table and fell backward into a sunken chair pushed against the far wall.
Sawyer nodded at the book on the table. ‘The Antidote. Don’t tell me you’re embracing the ways of Stoicism, Frazer?’
‘I’m not keen on any single “way”. I like the ideas, though. It basically boils down to three words: fuck positive thinking.’
‘You get more value from assuming the worst, working back from there, counting your blessings.’
Drummond slurped his coffee, winced. ‘You make it sound like a motivational plaque, Sawyer. The problem with Stoicism is that everyone goes for the easy message of focusing on what you can control, but nobody picks up on the idea of logos, which was central to Epictetus’s thinking.’
Sawyer sat down in the other chair. ‘It just means that we’re all part of the natural order of things. Spring fo
llows winter, then summer, then autumn, then things die off again in winter. Repeat.’
‘Until the heat death of the universe.’
‘Christians have just placed all of this in the hands of some imaginary divine being. We came from stardust, we’re living our Earthly lives now, and soon, like the seasons, we’ll die off, our blood relations will die off, and then we’ll be nothing but memories in the minds of the people who knew and loved us. We’re all part of that natural order, and so we shouldn’t get too wrapped up in our own importance.’
Drummond braved another sip of coffee. ‘We should do this life-affirming communion more often, Sawyer.’
‘I’m just saying that it shows how the only thing that really matters is our connections on Earth, and how they will eventually translate into memories in the minds of our loved ones, how they’ll carry us around once—’
‘We end up in one of those drawers.’ Drummond nodded to the wall, and the mortuary and autopsy room next door.
‘Like Duncan Hardwick and Mark Bishop.’
Drummond raised his eyebrows. ‘Nice segue. You know we can’t talk about that, though. Not while you’re off Keating’s Christmas card list.’
‘You know that we can. Your secretary isn’t the type to have a glass pressed against the door, and the clients are hardly listening. Hardwick and Bishop were both obviously the victims of the same killer. On the day I first started at Buxton, I met you in a meeting room where you were helping with a case. Martin Pittman was the SIO.’
Drummond nodded. ‘I remember Pittman, but not the case.’
Sawyer edged his chair forward. ‘It was a guy who ran a broiler chicken farm. The killer flayed him.’
‘You think it’s the same psycho?’
Sawyer smiled. ‘I was hoping you could take a look at the old file, see if there’s any connecting detail. It’s like there’s all of these links and similarities with other cases floating around, but I can’t quite find the element that snaps it into place.’
