Flesh House (24 page)

Logan pulled on a smile. 'How about we just make it about the Fleshers, sir?'

'Perfect! Oh and call me Ewan, "sir" makes me sound like an old man!' He winked, laughed, coughed for a bit - ending in a thin, rattling wheeze - then opened the double doors, revealing a long, dim corridor lined with ancient, grimylooking paintings. Low-wattage spots cast tiny pools of light on the pictures and dark-blue carpet. 'Trinity Hall has to be one of the best-kept secrets in Aberdeen: did you know we have a portrait of King William the Lion here? One of the oldest paintings in the place, been in the trades' possession for
centuries
. Absolutely priceless, can't even get it insured. We've got swords from the Battle of Harlaw in 1411. You see, the Seven Incorporated Trades have always been an integral part of the city. Did you know that for hundreds of years ...'

Logan let him chunter on about the Weavers, Wrights and Coopers, Shoemakers, Hammermen, Tailors, Bakers, and Fleshers, as they wandered past darkened meeting rooms. Steel slouched along at the back, making popping noises with her nicotine gum.

Strange, old-fashioned paintings in ornate golden frames hung on one side of the corridor, their paint blackened by the passage of time. Each had a coat of arms on it, some decoration, and a wodge of text, nearly indecipherable in the low light. On the other side it was all portraits, sour-faced old men in various disapproving poses.

'Bloody hell,' said Steel, interrupting an involved anecdote about the first Flesh House being built in 1631 to stop people slaughtering animals in the streets,'who ordered the ugly blokes with a side order of extra ugly?' She pointed at one of the portraits. 'My cat's arse is prettier than that.'

'Ah ... yes ...' The old man glanced at Alec's camera. 'Actually, that's--'

'Jesus! This one looks like a wart with a moustache!'

'And, er ... this,' said call-me-Ewan, changing the subject,'is the Fleshers' coat of arms.'

The painting was about the same size as Logan's kitchen table. A red shield - with three knives, an axe, and one of the little Aberdeen castles on it - sat in the middle, a severed ram's head on the left, a bull's on the right. Beneath each head was a passage of flowery script, ancient varnish making the words crackle.

Steel squinted at the text: '"When sacerdotal sacrifice and feasts, made altars smoak with blood of slaughtered beasts ... "'

The old man sighed. 'You have to understand that the Fleshers date back to a time when Aberdeen was in her infancy - all the trades do. If you look in our books, you'll see the same family names year after year, century after century. Generations of butchers all dedicated to supporting their trade and the community.' He ticked the points off on his fingers:'Alms to the poor, funding public works, providing social care long before the NHS was even dreamt of. What's happening now has nothing to do with the trade. We shouldn't be stigmatized just because some ... because someone hijacked the words from this painting.'

'It's OK,' said Steel,'you can call him a cock-sucking arse-weasel. I won't faint.' Wink. 'So come on then, how many people had access to this twenty years ago?'

'This painting's over a hundred and seventy-eight years old, Inspector. We have open days a couple of times a year: show members of the public around the hall, explain things to them, give them a bit of the history of the things we have here.'

'So you're saying it could have--'

'And each trade has a big annual dinner dance. The members invite their friends and family, clients sometimes.' He stared at the paintings. 'We've had to cancel ours. No one wants to accept an invitation from the Fleshers with all these horrible things going on ...'

Which wasn't surprising. Logan pulled out his list of names from 1990. 'You weren't interviewed during the original investigation?'

'No, my uncle died in seventy-four - I went back to Cupar for six months to help get everything in order, stayed for nineteen years. Didn't come up again till ninety-three.' He smiled. 'Missed all the excitement.'

'Do you recognize any of these names?'

Ewan produced a pair of half-moon glasses and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. Even then he had to hold the list at arm's length, going through the names one by one. 'Oh aye, he's still here ... so's he ... poor Charles took pancreatic cancer ... this one's moved to Australia to be with his grandkids ... no idea - before my time ... pneumonia ... Alzheimer's ... you know, I haven't seen Peter for ages. Think he's in a nursing home now ...' and on it went. Ewan seemed to sag as he got to the end of the list. 'Sorry. Seeing them all written down like this ... death gets us all in the end ...'

He took off his glasses and started down the corridor again. 'Would you like to see the Dead Man's Gallery?'

It was more like a passageway than a gallery - a long, thin space next to the main hall, lined with huge gilt frames containing dozens of little black and white photographs. 'When I first joined,' said Ewan, pointing at old-fashioned pictures of stiff, formal men with wild Victorian facial hail,'I'd show guests round here and we'd laugh at all the beardie-wierdies. Look at this one,' it was a young man with huge sideburns and mutton chops that reached well past the collar of his starched shirt,'like something out of
Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolf Man
, isn't he? It's not till you start seeing the faces of people you know in here that it really hits you: these were men. They had hopes and dreams, just like you and me. Families who loved them. Wives and children who mourned ...'

He led them down to another huge frame, this one with a tiny plaster coat of arms at the top: red background, curved knives. The frame was only half full and some of the photos were even in colour, fading away to that strange seventies orange tone. Wide lapels, brown suits, and more sideburns.

'And these,' said Ewan,'are our recently deceased members. There's Charles, I was telling you about him. Simon, Craig, Thomas ... This is John: he was in the second wave on D-Day. And that's my old mentor Edward. Lovely man; orphan, grew up in a children's home, came from nothing and ended up with three butcher's shops and a house in Rubislaw Den. Couldn't have kids of his own so they adopted a little girl from a broken home.' He pointed at a man with a ludicrous comb-over. 'Robert there took in a wee boy with polio. Jane and I had two girls of our own, but I never forgot Edward's example. So we adopted our youngest, Ben. Abandoned on the steps of St Nicholas church the day after he was born. How could someone just throw away a life like that? Madness ...' Ewan stared at the photos in silence for a moment. Then went through them one by one:'Cancer, cancer, heart attack, pneumonia, cancer, Thomas had a stroke two weeks after his wife died; Edward and Sheila went in a car crash. Robert took an aneurism on Union Street.'

He tapped the glass. 'One day I'll be in there. And people will come in and laugh at my photo. I'll be dead, but I'll always be part of something. That's important, isn't it? Not to disappear into nothing ...'

'
Pierdolona kurwa
fuck.' Andrzej Jaskolski jabbed at the start button again. 'Work
jebany
piece of shit!' he kicked the metal wall, but the mill still wouldn't start. Typical: the boilers go down for two days and now the
pierdolone
bone mill was broken too. 'Go to UK,' said his wife,'earn lots of money, come back and set up own clinic in Warsaw. Be rich man.'
Kurwa mac
. Degree in Orthopaedic Therapy and he ends up working in stinking rendering plan in stinking abattoir in stinking arse end of nowhere Scottish backwater.

Another kick. 'Start, dirty bitch fuck!'

One more kick and the machine rumbled into life, the huge steel teeth at the bottom of the trough grinding through bones and off-cuts and fat.

Only no chopped up bones fell into the next hopper.

Ja pierdole!

He grabbed the long wooden pole that leant against the wall - still not laughing at the
kurwo
foreman's joke - and jabbed at the mass of bones.

Poke, jab, poke. A sudden
clunk
, and the pile slumped. Grinding noise. Bone and gristle fragments chugged into the next hopper, ready to be torn up into even smaller pieces.

Andrzej Jaskolski turned to put the pole back where he'd got it. Tonight he'd go into town with other Polish workers from abattoir. Drink. Maybe dance. Maybe find nice woman with own flat and not go back to
jebanego
bed and breakfast with no hot water and stains on ceiling and bed made of concrete.

He froze, one hand on the pole, then turned back to the sinking mass of cattle bones. Sweat breaking out on his forehead. Hoping his eyes were playing tricks on him ...

They weren't.

'
O kurwa jebana mac
...'

34

Logan had never seen an abattoir before. He'd been expecting a wooden building with blood-smeared concrete and wailing cattle, but from the outside, Alaba Farm Fresh Meats looked more like a warehouse. A big, breezeblock building with a green metal roof and a two-storey block of offices, all hidden behind a thick, twelve-foot-high leylandii hedge. From the street you'd have no idea what was going on inside - if it wasn't for the smell.

The company sign tried to make everything look jolly and approachable:'F
ARM
T
O
P
LATE
, S
COTCH
M
EAT
I
S
G
REAT
!' and a happy cartoon pig, wearing a butcher's outfit and holding a cleaver.

Logan marched past the thing, across the car park, and up to the security bunker. An articulated lorry was stopped at the barricade, its headlights glowing in the thin, cold drizzle, sheep staring out from the four-storey trailer as the driver argued with one of the guards.

'What the hell am I supposed to do with all these bloody sheep?'

'It's no' ma fault, is it? Police say naebiddy gets in or oot till they've finished.'

Logan hurried inside. Security monitors dominated one wall, showing white oversuited figures picking their way through the abattoir and its outbuildings. Three uniformed PCs sat going through the old tapes, wreathed in the comforting steam of hot coffee. Logan helped himself to a mug, then stood with his backside against the radiator, watching them work. 'Anything?'

One of the PCs shrugged. 'Not yet.'

When his bum had defrosted, Logan topped up his coffee, poured one for Steel, and headed out into the abattoir grounds.

Everything was going on round the back, the harsh white glare of the IB's spotlights cutting through the cold November night.

He struggled into yet another SOC oversuit and followed a line of blue-and-white POLICE tape into a three-storey, enclosed metal structure. The smell was much worse here: raw meat and roasting animal fat, like a lamb chop left under the grill for too long. The air felt ...
greasy
with a sour edge to it that made his stomach churn.

Steel was at the top of the stairs, hands jammed deep into her pockets, her face creased in disgust. 'What took you so long?'

'You're welcome.' He handed over the extra mug of coffee.

'This got sugar in it?'

'What do you think?' Logan stepped round the inspector, peering over the guard rail at a mass of bones, hooves and offal. There were two IB technicians in there, passing chunks out to a third who carried them over to a collapsible table, where Isobel scrutinized them.

'Bloody stinks in here ...' Steel wrapped her hands around her mug. 'Come on then, door-to-doors?'

Logan pointed towards the back wall of the bone mill. 'All the houses on that side are derelict - apparently no one wants buy a three-bedroom semi downwind of an abattoir.'

'There's a surprise.'

'Uniform are going through the rest. Nothing so far.'

'Yeah, well, the pretty and talented DCS Bain is interviewing the workforce as we speak. So that'll be a bloody disaster.' The inspector sipped her coffee, and grimaced. 'This taste funny to you?'

'It was fine in the security bunker ...' but Steel was right, out here it had developed an unpleasant flavour of rancid lard.

'Right,' she leant on the guard rail, watching as Isobel chucked a long bone into a wheelbarrow and waved for the next sample,'half six - the abattoir's running double shifts to catch up,'cos they've had an equipment failure - and some poor sod's clearing out the bone cruncher. Turns out he's an orthopaedic thingy back in Poland, so when he sees a human thighbone poking out of the pile he hits the emergency stop and refuses to budge till they call the police.' She shook her head. 'Weird, eh? Guy goes to medical school and ends up over here,' cos he can make more money working in an abattoir shovelling bones than he can doctoring back home.'

'You question him?'

Steel turned. 'No, I took his word for it when he said he'd no' hacked anyone up. Looked like an honest bloke ...' she slapped Logan on the arm. 'Course I bloody questioned him.'

Isobel straightened up from her table and passed a triangle of bone to her assistant. 'Scapula.' It went into a blue plastic evidence box.

Steel pointed at the growing pile of human remains. 'It's Tom Stephen, they found his head ... you want to see?'

'Excuse me?' A man in white Wellington boots, baggy plastic trousers, overcoat, hairnet and hardhat had appeared on the walkway behind them. 'Do you think this is going to be finished tonight? Only we've got a backlog--'

'How'd you get up here?'

He pointed over his shoulder. 'Access door from the Den of Dung - where we rinse out the intestines and stomachs ...' He dropped his voice to a whisper,'Look, can't you just empty this lot out and take it with you?'

'Excuse me a moment, sir,' Steel leant on the guardrail and shouted down at someone on the ground. 'I told you to seal the bloody entrances! That means
all
the entrances, no' just the ones you can be arsed with!'

She turned back to the gentleman. 'Sorry about that. Now if you don't mind: this'll go a lot faster if you let us get on with out jobs.'

'But--'

'This is the way it works. We have to go through each and every chunk of crap in that hopper. Then we're going to examine every bit of meat in the place. And until we've done that, you're no' hacking up anything else. Comprende?'

'But I've got orders to fulfil! We have to--'

'Oh, is this no' a good time for you? You should have said! Tell you what, why don't we just forget all about the human remains we found in your rendering plant--'

'Protein processing. We don't call it "rendering" anymore, on account of--'

'I don't care! You're shut down till I tell you different!' And with that she stomped off. It would have been an impressive exit, if she hadn't stopped halfway down the stairs to haul her SOC oversuit out from the crack of her backside.

The man in the white outfit watched her go. 'But we've got a backlog ...'

Logan patted him on the shoulder. 'I'm afraid she's right: we can't risk any more human meat getting into the food chain.' He looked up at the company name, written along the side of the abattoir building in three-foot-high lettering. 'It's an unusual way to spell Alba.'

'The MD's idea: he got fed up having to explain how to pronounce it all the time.'

'Look on the bright side, it ...' Logan stopped and frowned. 'Do you supply wholesalers? Butchers, cash and carrys, things like that?'

'Couple of supermarket chains too. We're very proud of our traditional--'

He was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. 'I'm going to need a list of your customers.'

DI Steel was slumped in one of the boardroom chairs, hands over her face, listening as Logan told her the bad news. Again. He waited for her to go off on one, rant and swear, try to pin the blame on someone else. But instead she let her head fall back, stared at the ceiling, and said,'Oh ... sodding hell.'

The boardroom was lined with posters of steaks, roasts, things on skewers, mince, chops, and those charts telling you which cut comes from which part of which animal. Like a preschool puzzle in meat.

She scrubbed her hands across her face, sighed, then asked Logan if he was sure.

'Positive. The abattoir supplies Thompson's Cash and Carry, and McFarlane's butcher shop.'

'Oh, we are so screwed!'

Midnight. Logan stopped on the damp concrete walkway and yawned, caught in the glare of a security spotlight. Drizzle made his SOC suit shine. The bone mill had been cleared out, the abattoir's butchery and packaging areas searched and sealed off, and all the senior officers had buggered off to their beds. Bastards.

Logan stretched, groaned, and yawned again. Three disembodied sheep heads lay on the ground beside an empty skip, their creamy wool tinged with dark red. He knew how they felt.

The shed where they aged the beef and lamb stood off to one side - a large refrigerated building full of vacuum-packed meat and shivering police officers. They'd been at it for four hours, and still didn't know if they'd found anything or not.

'Like pulling teeth.' The Police Search Advisor in charge of the shed team cupped his latex-gloved hands and blew into them. 'I mean, look at it ...' he indicated the rows of shelving, the green trays full of meat - dark purple in the fluorescent lighting - the black plastic latticework of the big storage bins. 'There's tons of the bloody stuff in here and it all looks the same to me.'

It was Thompson's Cash and Carry all over again, only on a
much
larger scale.

The POLSA turned and nodded at Doc Fraser. The old pathologist was huddled in a vast tartan blanket, examining shiny packages of dark meat. 'Poor sod's pushing sixty: should be sat on his backside drinking cocoa and fantasising about Doris Day in a bath full of jam, not buggering about in a bloody big fridge.'

'You better tell everyone to take a break in ...' Logan checked his watch. 'What, twenty minutes? Don't want them keeling over with hypothermia.'

'Any chance of a cuppa, or something?'

'They're opening the abattoir canteen for us - do everyone a hot meal, something with chips. It's--'

'Ah, no offence, like, but they sell human meat here. I'm no' eating
anything
.'

Logan had to admit that he had a point.

The second search team were working their way through the skin shed - four constables in grimy SOC suits - smeared with dirty-pink salt and globbets of fat - peeling the cattle skins from their piles one at a time, making sure nothing looked as if it belonged on a human body.

Logan got an update from the officer in charge, commiserated with him about the stink, then got out of there as quickly as possible. But the skin shed was Santa's Grotto compared to the protein processing plant.

It was a dark, low-ceilinged room, just off the bone mill, oppressively hot and humid. Logan gagged: the smell of greasy, rendering fat was nearly overpowering. For some bizarre reason a small, wooden garden shed sat against one wall, the windows fogged over with condensation and a film of tallow.

Filthy pipes snaked through the air, leading in and out of three large black ovens that wouldn't have looked out of place in a horror movie. Team three were working their way through a trio of centrifuges, picking tiny chunks out of a hessian-wrapped disk the size of a tractor wheel.

He'd been there less than thirty seconds, but Logan was already starting to sweat. 'How you getting on?'

The female officer pulled off her facemask, pushed a limp strand of hair from her shiny face, and said,'Bloody dreadful, sir. Ovens've been off since about seven and it's still baking in here. And this,' she held up a handful of little lumps,'could be anything! Look at it! Bones, hooves, heads, blood, fat, it all gets passed through two sodding big sets of metal teeth till it's no bigger than the tip of your thumb. Then it gets stuffed in those boilers and cooked to death. It's just rubble!'

She tossed her handful of animal-gravel into a big metal sieve.'
And
we're dying of thirst.'

Logan looked at the centrifuges and their unidentifiable grey loads. 'How much more you got to do?'

'Heaps.'

'OK, go get a cup of tea and--'

'Holy shit!' It was one of the male officers, he had something clamped between his thumb and forefinger, twisting whatever it was, so it glittered in the gloom. Everyone hurried round, peering at the tiny lump in his hand. He dropped it into Logan's open, latex-gloved palm. It was a gold tooth.

Ten minutes later someone found another one - the crown for a rear molar. And that seemed to get their eye in. In twenty minutes they turned up half a dozen little lumps of grey-black metal: fillings, some still attached to their teeth.

Whoever the Flesher really was, he'd discovered a nearly perfect way to dispose of a body. After the bone mill, the ovens and the centrifuges, whatever solids were left went into another hopper to be ground into powder and sold to pet food manufacturers. God knew how many victims' remains had gone through people's dogs and cats, but Logan got the nasty feeling Thomas Stephen was just the tip of the iceberg.

Warm. Heather rolled over onto her side, smiling in the darkness. She bunched the duvet round her body, enjoying the feeling of fresh pyjamas on her clean skin. The soft swell of the pillow beneath her head.

'
It's not that surprising, when you think about it
,' said Mr New. He'd calmed down a lot - death seemed to agree with him.

Duncan sighed.'
She's trying to sleep
.'

'
Stockholm syndrome they call it. She's been here for so long, dependent on the Flesher for everything: food, water, survival. She identifies with him. Not to mention the physical and mental strain she's been under
.'