Kill Call (22 page)

Hitchens didn’t seem to be listening as he ran his eye over a sheet filled with dense paragraphs of text.

‘Trichinosis is actually quite rare in this country,’ he said. ‘Or it used to be.’

Fry felt a small shiver of unease. She wasn’t a hypochondriac by any means, but even so, she didn’t like the idea of this disease. What was that about a nematode worm? Just the name of it sounded disgusting.

‘Are you saying we’ve got an epidemic, sir? Is this thing contagious?’

‘Not exactly. Well, you don’t catch it from other human beings.’

Reluctantly, Fry found her thoughts flicking back to the previous day. The smell of horses, the wet plop of something unspeakable hitting her shoes.

‘I’m liking the sound of it even less now.’

‘The infection is caused by eating raw or under-cooked meat, usually pork,’ said Hitchens. ‘The experts say cases have increased in recent years, generally blamed on Eastern Europe and the movement of migrant workers within the EU. There was a major outbreak in France, with more than four hundred people affected – traced to meat imported from Yugoslavia. Another case in Ireland, pork sausages brought in by Polish nationals. And the last outbreak of trichinosis here in the UK was in 1999 – eight Yugoslav immigrants. That was caused by salami from Serbia.’

Fry began to relax. ‘Luckily, I’m not a big fan of pork. But I can’t see the relevance of this to us, sir.’

‘Well … there’s been another outbreak here in the Midlands. The first in the UK for ten years. It’s not widespread, and they don’t want to cause panic. But the source of the infection might be relevant.’

‘It’s an Environmental Health job, surely? Them, or DEFRA. If somebody is selling infected pork meat they have the statutory powers to close businesses down and prosecute. They don’t need us.’

‘No, of course not. But some conscientious EHO must have been reading the bulletins. They made a connection to one of our current enquiries.’

‘Which current enquiry?’

‘Well, you put it together …’ Hitchens slid the file across the desk to her. ‘Historically, most outbreaks of trichinosis are caused by infected pork meat, but this one is different. The common factor among these victims is that they’ve been eating undercooked horse meat.’

Fry felt her stomach turn over. You didn’t have to be a fan of horses to have doubts about eating one. Very big doubts.

‘Horse meat? Isn’t that illegal here?’

‘Ah now, there you’re wrong,’ said Hitchens. ‘It isn’t illegal, just culturally unacceptable. I hear it’s very popular among our friends in France and Italy, and no doubt other countries.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem,’ said Hitchens, ‘seems to be how this horse meat is sourced in the first place.’

‘What?’

Hitchens sighed. ‘This Rawson case gets more and more complicated. But let DC Cooper show you the film he was sent. The allegation seems to be that Patrick Rawson was obtaining horses to be sold for slaughter. When I say “obtaining”, we have to be open to the idea that some of the horses were stolen, or obtained by deception, don’t we?’

‘Yes, given his history. But, by slaughtered, you mean …?’

‘For human consumption.’

‘Oh, god.’

‘While you were in Sutton Coldfield,’ said Hitchens, ‘DC Irvine and DC Hurst came up with background on some of the contacts whose numbers were in Mr Rawson’s phone book. One of those is a company we might be interested in: R & G Enterprises. They have a small distribution centre on an enterprise park near Buxton.’

‘Distributing what?’ asked Fry, with a sinking heart.

Hitchens smiled. ‘Meat, of course.’

Down in the car park, a tow truck was bringing in Patrick Rawson’s Mitsubishi for closer forensic examination. Fry found Cooper watching it arrive from the window of the CID room.

‘Mr Rawson had hands-free mobile in the car, didn’t he?’ he said.

‘Yes, why?’ asked Fry.

Cooper shrugged. ‘It’s funny that he seems to have been more worried about getting caught using a mobile phone while driving than he was concerned about being convicted for fraud, or breaches of the Trade Descriptions Act.’

‘That doesn’t seem particularly odd to me.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Cooper. ‘So even Patrick Rawson had the feeling that he was more likely to be prosecuted if he was an easy target.’

He seemed to make the last comment to himself, so Fry ignored it.

‘We’re starting to get an angle on Mr Rawson’s business interests, anyway,’ she said. ‘This is almost a local one: R & G Enterprises Limited, with a trading address in Buxton. Directors are listed as Patrick Thomas Rawson and Maurice Gains.’

‘Mr Rawson, the man with his finger in lots of pies.’

‘And how many of them are dodgy?’ said Fry. ‘If you want something really frightening, Ben, have a read of this briefing.’

‘What’s this?’ Cooper took the file from her. ‘Trichinosis?’

‘It’s the latest reason for turning vegetarian.’

‘Oh, great.’

Cooper was silent as he read. Fry knew that the briefing was horribly specific about the progress of the disease. When any human being or animal ate meat that contained trichinella cysts, the acid in the stomach dissolved the hard covering, releasing larvae into the small intestine. Adults laid eggs, which developed into more larvae and travelled through the arteries to the muscles, where they curled into balls and became cysts again. And the cycle started over.

Most cases of trichinosis were mild, but if you didn’t get treatment with anti-inflammatory steroids, you could die. Someone in Paris had done exactly that, during the last French epidemic from eating raw horsemeat that originated in Poland.

‘This case in Paris,’ said Cooper. ‘Raw horse meat from Poland – It’s …’

Words seemed to fail him.

‘I know,’ said Fry.

She had begun to feel even sicker when she read the details of that case. An infected horse head had entered the human food chain. Not just meat, but the head. The number of people infected was explained by a high concentration of larvae in the horse’s carcass, and by the custom of mixing meat from several horses’ heads, to be eaten as raw mince.

Worst of all, the originating farm entered on official documents did not exist. No one would ever know where that outbreak of trichinosis had come from.

Fry looked up at Cooper when he’d finished reading. He looked just about as sick as she felt.

‘Will you take the abattoir, Ben?’ she said.

‘Oh, how did I guess? What about you?’

‘I’ll go where the meat is.’

The three men were on their weekly hike. They were three retired police officers, puffing a little as they reached the top of the track on the remaining unspoiled stretch of Longstone Moor.

Inquisitively, one of them diverted away from the path towards the deep gash of Watersaw Rake, the abandoned opencast quarry workings. There was a fence around the hole, but it was low enough to step over.

‘Careful, Jack,’ called one of his friends. ‘We’re not carrying you home if you break your leg.’

‘You’d think they’d do something with this,’ he said. ‘Fill it in, or whatever.’

‘They’ve certainly wrecked the hillside with their quarrying.’

‘It employs local people, though. That’s the important thing.’

His friends came to join him at the fence, pushing their way through the heather to find a rabbit track wide enough for their boots.

‘Come on, Jack. What are you doing?’

‘He still thinks he’s on the job. Always wants to know what’s going on.’

But the first man wasn’t listening to them. He was over the fence and looking down into the rake. The sides were steep and lined with shattered rock. The bottom was fifty feet below, littered with debris from the quarrying.

‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘Right on the bottom of the rake.’

‘Just rocks. Or a dead sheep.’

‘No. That’s not what it is.’

20

The Snake Pass had been closed between Glossop and Ladybower for several weeks after another landslip. The floods in January had also burst an old mining adit, the build-up of water cracking a hole the size of a railway tunnel in the side of Drake Hill.

It was proof, if anyone still needed it, that too much rain could change the landscape dramatically. If you watched the hills after a heavy downpour, you could see the smallest streams gushing into brown cascades as they tumbled into the valleys, washing down peat from the moors and loose stones from the hillsides.

But Cooper was driving eastwards from Ladybower, heading in towards Sheffield on the A57, now clear of the previous night’s fog. From Sheffield, he had to find his way north, skirting Howden Moors, to enter the tangle of former mill towns on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines.

DC Luke Irvine had declared himself free enough of the backlog of file preparation work to accompany Cooper on the trip to Yorkshire. Fry had looked a bit sceptical at first, but had given him the nod. Cooper was glad to have Luke with him. It made such a difference being in the car with the younger DC instead of travelling with Diane Fry and having to watch every word he said.

‘My family are from West Yorkshire,’ said Irvine as they came in sight of the wind farm near Penistone.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Cooper, who had assumed Irvine was of Scottish origin, what with his surname and the blue eyes, and the sandy hair.

‘Denby Dale, between Huddersfield and Barnsley. My Dad used to work in the mining-equipment industry, but his job went when all the pits closed down. So he got a job at Rolls-Royce in Derby. And the family moved down. I was only five at the time, so I don’t remember much about Denby Dale, except visiting my grandma.’

‘You never thought of going into engineering like your dad?’ asked Cooper.

‘No.’

Irvine said it so abruptly that Cooper wondered what the story was behind his decision to join the police. There was a long history of conflict between the police and men working in the coal industry, going back to the 1984–85 miners’ strike. Communities had been split, families divided, and the resulting bad blood had lingered for twenty-five years in some areas. He decided it might be better not to ask – until he knew Luke better, anyway.

‘I think we need to get on to the A636,’ said Irvine.

‘Sure.’

A few minutes later, Cooper steered the Toyota down a bumpy lane, following directions taken from a local. Sheltered behind a line of dense conifers, the slaughterhouse was almost invisible to a casual passer-by. Even if he’d been a rambler out on a stroll, he might not have seen it. The approach was via a long, winding lane that would have been difficult to find in itself without directions. At the end of the track was a collection of grubby stone buildings, devoid of any signs to indicate what they were. In the yard stood a row of steel-sided wagons that had brought animals for slaughter.

But once you reached it, and got out of the car, there was no mistaking what this place was. A distinctive smell filled the air. Blood, urine and dead flesh.

Cooper was no vegetarian. He liked a good steak as much as the next man. But the smell of meat in large quantities was cloying and sickly. It made him think of an old-fashioned butcher’s shop his mother used to take him to in town when he was a child. There had always been joints of meat hung all around the shop, and some had probably been there for days. It was one of those childhood impressions that could be brought back instantly by a smell like this.

The butcher’s was long gone now, of course. If his mother was still alive, she would be buying her meat shrink-wrapped from a chill cabinet at the supermarket, just like everyone else. That, or she would have found her own private source, which was still possible if you knew where to ask.

‘I hope we get masks,’ said Irvine. ‘I don’t think I can hold my breath until we get back to the car.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

But this was more than just the smell of meat. There was an underlying odour of putrefaction that no amount of cleaning and disinfectant could alleviate. It was obvious to anyone with a functioning sense of smell. With one sniff, you could tell whether meat was fresh or had gone off.

Cooper glanced around the site. Somewhere, there would be skips where the waste and offal were discarded to await incineration. He pictured hoppers full of skins from butchered animals, drains where rivulets of blood soaked away.

There used to be a small, privately owned abattoir in Lowbridge, near Edendale, which he’d visited once with Diane Fry. But it had gone out of business, like many local operations, unable to bear the cost of regulations and new equipment. Now Hawleys was the sort of place that animals went to, travelling longer distances to meet their fate.

‘Slaughterhouses like ours aren’t doing anything wrong or inhumane, you know,’ said Melvyn Hawley, who introduced himself as one of the sons in C. J. Hawley and Sons. ‘These animal rights people are talking out of their arses.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, there might be a bit of ill treatment in the industry, here and there. But the level of welfare abuse is nothing compared to what would go on if there was no abattoir trade. Abattoirs like ours are regulated and inspected to the nth degree. If you were to take away that commercial structure, and the professionalism that goes with it, you would lose control of the whole process.’

‘I suppose so.’

Melvyn Hawley was a tall, thin man, and so pale that he looked as though he’d never eaten meat in his life. Did working in a place like this put you off? If he was one of the sons, Hawley must have grown up with the idea of what went on in an abattoir. Killing as a means of earning a living. It was enough to make anyone a little awkward in normal company.

When they arrived, Cooper and Irvine had been taken into a small office. Bright, white-painted walls, the smell of disinfectant. Just enough room for three or four chairs, and a row of filing cabinets.

‘Besides,’ said Hawley, eyeing Cooper cautiously, ‘when it comes to the slaughter of horses, we’re just clearing up the mess left by the racing industry. That’s what I always say.’

‘How is that, sir?’

‘Well, they have massive breeding programmes, you know. Far too many horses are produced, and only the best survive. It’s a dirty little secret the racing industry would rather no one knew. I dare say horse lovers fondly imagine that all those unwanted racehorses live out their days grazing happily in some sunlit meadow. Some nice, kind person is looking after them somewhere in their old age? Yeah, right.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Well, that nice person would need to have very deep pockets. It costs thousands to feed and look after just one retired race horse.’