Cold Cuts Read online

  We’re already in, thought Bain.

  “Sir,” said Pereira, and he nodded, a reserved formality about him, a look that Pereira recognised, then he turned back to his computer.

  “Take a seat,” he said, and they lifted the two plastic chairs that were against the wall in the office and placed them across the desk from the DCI.

  Another moment, and then Cooper turned back.

  “You’ll have listened to the news, Inspector?” he said.

  Pereira shook her head. Somehow, the fact that her work was actually considered newsworthy regularly came as a surprise to her, and she hadn’t thought to turn on the radio. There was enough to make her feel guilty in the world, however, and she wasn’t about to feel bad that she’d chosen to listen to Billie Holliday instead.

  “Sergeant?” he asked, turning to Bain, as though he might have travelled independently.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  Cooper squeezed his lips together, nodded — an air of disappointment about him — and then turned his computer around for them to see. He was looking at the home page of the Daily Record. There was a photograph of Kevin Moyes, and a picture of processed meat, along with the headline, Gruesome Find As Search For Football Hero Ends In Tragedy.

  He allowed them to read the headline for much longer than was required, particularly given that there was none of the subsequent report on the screen, then he turned the monitor away again, and looked back across the desk.

  “Football hero?” asked Bain.

  Cooper lifted his eyes, seemed to shake his head without his head really moving.

  “Turns out he was featured in the Record a few years ago because he rescued a kid who got caught up in a brief rampage outside an Old Firm game.”

  “Stretching the definition,” said Bain.

  “You think?” said Cooper, then he added quickly, “Where are we?” and looked at Pereira. “Don’t you love it when stories are out of control on the news?”

  “You can’t control the news, sir,” said Pereira.

  “Maybe not, but you can play them, and at least try to manipulate them. You were saying?”

  He looked impatiently at her, something about him suggesting he thought Pereira to blame for every aspect of the story that he didn’t like. After the pleasure of working for Parker the previous few years, she instantly recognised that in reporting to Cooper she was going to be playing a completely different ball game. The old ball game. The one she’d had to play so many times in the past.

  “There’s nothing so far to indicate this is more than an isolated case, but obviously we’re still waiting for test results,” she began.

  “I know,” said Cooper.

  A moment’s hesitation, then she continued, “We’ll go out to Eurocentral and the production facility in the morning. If it turns out that this is a one-off issue, then we need to find out how someone who was killed and presumably butchered in Millport ended up getting delivered to premises in the town, when those deliveries were routed–”

  “Are you going to tell me something I don’t know, Inspector?” asked Cooper, his voice deadpan.

  Pereira gave herself a moment, holding his gaze the whole time, and then said, “We’re still scoping the extent of the problem, sir. The investigation is just getting underway. Once we know what we’re dealing with and how far-reaching the problem is, we can begin to–”

  “Very well,” he said, a voice of disenchantment, as though he’d been expecting her to arrive with news that they were more or less on the verge of making an arrest. “Sergeant?” he said, turning to Bain. “Anything to add?”

  Bain took a moment, still getting the measure of the man. He’d only been working with Pereira for six months, and with Parker in charge had not yet been exposed to the kind of prejudice that Pereira herself had grown used to in the previous twenty years.

  “Like the Inspector says,” he said. “Still setting up the chickens so we know how many we have to shoot.”

  “Don’t you mean ducks?” said Cooper.

  Nothing like stern authority, thought Bain himself, to turn the words leaving your mouth to utter drivel.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You have the helm for the moment,” said Cooper, turning back to Pereira. “I‘d like a full report on your progress in the next half hour, including ideas on how we’re going to take this forward tomorrow.”

  As soon as he’d finished speaking, he turned back to his computer, the dismissal from his office implicit in the movement. Pereira did not look at Bain, instead quickly getting to her feet and walking to the door.

  “Inspector.”

  She took a moment, stopped herself grinding her teeth — her mother had told her often enough not to grind her teeth — then she turned back. Cooper was looking at her again, and instantly the atmosphere in the room had taken on even more of an edge.

  This isn’t about me, thought Bain. I shouldn’t be here. Yet he was trapped, Pereira standing in the doorway. And so he looked uncomfortably at Cooper and waited to see what kind of man he would prove himself to be. So far, it hadn’t been a great start.

  “I’m not a fan of positive discrimination,” said Cooper, “but never let it be said that I don’t have an open mind.”

  He paused, perhaps waiting for Pereira to fill the gap. She had never benefitted from positive discrimination, but she wasn’t about to defend herself to someone who was in the process of demonstrating that he clearly did not have an open mind.

  He held her gaze for a few moments, and then when it became clear she had nothing to say, he nodded in the direction of the door and said. “Do your job.”

  She turned away and walked quickly back to her desk. Nothing she hadn’t heard before, and, same as it had always been, she just needed to get on with the work in front of her. The do your job line might have been meant dismissively — it had certainly been said as a statement of dismissal — but it was right nevertheless.

  She had been blessed with having DCI Parker, but he was gone now, and she was just going to have to do what she’d always done. Turn up for work, solve crime, catch criminals, make the city safer, be herself.

  Finally a small smile came to her face at the triteness of the internal monologue.

  “Get you a coffee?” asked Bain, as she sat down at her desk.

  She noticed that Bain too had a familiar look on his face. The look of concern. He’d just witnessed discrimination in action, and there was worry for her combined with the knowledge that he hadn’t said anything himself. He had been unable to speak up against the senior officer.

  “It’s all right, Marc, you don’t have to look at me as though I’ve got cancer. I’m quite used to it.”

  “I didn’t …” he began, but then didn’t finish the sentence because, in fact, he had.

  “A tea would be nice, thanks,” she said, and Bain nodded apologetically, as if he had something to apologise for, and walked over to the coffee machine.

  She watched him for a moment, deep breath, checked the time, then lifted the phone.

  Her mother answered after one ring. Waiting for the call, thought Pereira.

  “Aliya,” she said.

  “Sorry, mum,” said Pereira. “I’ll be another hour. Is Robin in bed yet?”

  “He’s just going,” said her mother, which Pereira knew was code for the fact she hadn’t begun the process, then she added, “I’ll get him for you.”

  Pereira rubbed her forehead as she brought her inbox up onto the screen. Two hundred and fifty-three unread messages. A regular kind of a day, and she quickly began to scan down, deleting the dross and the urgent requests for help that were already too far in the past for her response to be of any use.

  “Mum? Are you coming home?” asked Robin.

  “Sorry, dear,” said Pereira. “Not yet.”

  “Is it the human flesh story?” he asked, his voice pitched at a level of some excitement.

  “Did Nana let you watch the news?”

  �
��Anais told me,” he said, words still tumbling out. “She said it was dead gruesome.”

  Pereira closed her eyes. Standing up for herself at work was one thing. Getting Robin’s older sister to not play up to her attentive audience was another altogether.

  “Did you eat any of the meat, Mum?”

  “No,” said Pereira, followed by the quick pivot. “How was school?”

  “Did anyone?”

  “Did anyone what?”

  “Did anyone eat the human flesh? What does it taste like? Anais said it tastes like chicken. She said everything tastes like chicken.”

  “Robin, I’m on to say good night, and to tell you to get to bed. Can we not talk about this, please?”

  “Nana said I could stay up.”

  “She did not. You’ve got school tomorrow, so you need to go to bed right now.”

  “Night, Mum.”

  He hung up.

  Pereira held the phone in her hand for a few moments, and then looked at the screen, the line now dead, the picture of her two smiling children — in happier times, as she always thought of it, even though the holiday in Anstruther four months earlier, when it’d been taken, hadn’t been especially happy — looking back at her.

  “Boss,” said Bain, and he placed her tea in front of her, then took his coffee round to his own desk and sat down, immediately turning to his monitor and going through the same routine as Pereira. Quick scan of the inbox, deleting the dross as he went.

  “Robbie Coltrane, I reckon,” he said after a few moments. “He can play a decent bastard sometimes.”

  Pereira waited a moment, accepted that Bain was going to attempt to lighten the tone, and said, “Robbie Coltrane?”

  “When they’re making a movie of the sliced human meat case, I reckon Cooper’ll get played by Robbie Coltrane.”

  Pereira didn’t have anything to say to that, though she did find herself staring across the desk.

  “The Curious Case Of The Cold Cuts Killer,” said Bain. “What d’you think? Nice alliteration.”

  “Cold cuts?”

  “That’s what American’s call processed meat. Sliced ham, that kind of thing.”

  “I knew that,” she said, absent-mindedly, turning back to the monitor, then she added, “Isn’t Robbie Coltrane too tall?”

  “Not really. You know, he’s six-foot odd, but he’s not actually Hagrid.”

  “Funny. Do I have to ask you who’s going to play you and me?” she asked, covering up her slight embarrassment at the fact that she had been thinking of Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid.

  “Ewan MacGregor for me,” said Bain.

  “Of course,” said Pereira, smiling.

  “Or McEvoy, but he’s a bit of a short arse. I reckon they’ll change your character into a man, and get Irrfan Khan.”

  Pereira laughed.

  “Are you saying that because you don’t know any Indian actresses, or because you think Hollywood couldn’t cope with a female Indian lead in a cop movie?” she asked, smiling, shaking her head at the same time.

  “Karisma Kapoor,” said Bain. “Amrita Rao …”

  “All right,” said Pereira, “I was forgetting you know your stuff.”

  “So, you’re right, it’s the latter,” said Bain.

  “I’m sure Irrfan will do a fine job.”

  “Love that guy,” said Bain. “I could watch him reading a newspaper.”

  Pereira stared idly at a wall while she imagined Irrfan Khan reading a newspaper.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s very attractive.”

  “He’s all yours,” said Bain.

  Pereira nodded, a slight roll of the eyes, and with that it was acknowledged between them that the mood had been successfully lifted, and that the curse Cooper had placed upon them had been, for the moment, left in the past.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wednesday morning. Tests results had come in dribs and drabs, expedited overnight to grumbling from those who had been pushed to the back of the queue, but this had quickly become the feature story of this twenty-four hour news cycle.

  “Twenty-four?” Cooper had muttered. “We’re looking at two hundred and forty if we don’t get this mess cleared up quickly.”

  So far it looked as though the worst-case scenario, Fleshmageddon as the Sun had talked hopefully of that morning, was not going to happen. There had been no meat identified from any source other than Kevin Moyes, no other meat discovered at the distribution warehouse, and none in any shops beyond the environs of Largs and Millport.

  What had been discovered, was meat from all over Moyes’s body. That slim hope, if hope it had been, that someone had butchered his leg while leaving him alive, was long gone.

  In death, he had not travelled far. He had, however, been packaged as beef and pork slices, haggis, offal and pulled pork. The tuna mix was found to contain a cheaper cut of white fish, but nothing human.

  After meeting with Cooper, Pereira and Bain had travelled out to Cumbernauld to the meat processing factory, the banal sounding Meat & Poultry Products Ltd. The distribution company, MeatLux, had at least been able to show that they had received the packages from MPP, and so largely disengaged themselves from the process of investigation. They had merely done what it said in their job description: taken delivery of one thing, and sent it on somewhere else.

  Pereira and Bain were standing on a gantry above the factory floor, alongside a woman in a dark blue trouser suit. She was standing to Pereira’s right, her hands resting side by side on the top of the railing, nails beautifully manicured, varnished in matching blue.

  “You don’t take packaged products from anywhere else and sell them on?”

  “You mean, we don’t outsource the packaging to other companies?” asked Ellen Whittaker.

  “Yes, that was what I meant,” said Pereira.

  “No, we do all our own work.”

  “Well, then, you know how this looks,” said Pereira.

  Whittaker, lips pursed, stared grimly down over the factory floor. Her right index fingered tapped on the railing. Bain watched her, knowing that she would be aware of his eyes on her, even though she wasn’t looking at him.

  Glenn Close, he thought. A young Glenn Close.

  “We’re going to have to shut everything down while you take a look,” said Whittaker.

  “Yes,” said Pereira.

  “When word gets out …” said Whittaker, and she didn’t bother to complete the sentence.

  When word got out, it would be the end of them. They were going to have to close down for a while, get rid of all their current stock, thoroughly clean all the machinery and equipment. Perhaps they might have to put out the story that they had trashed all the equipment and bought new, and she immediately started thinking that through, wondering if they’d be able to get away with it. But maybe it wouldn’t matter. In the interim period, while they were closed and while they were under investigation, their business would not wait for them. And how exactly would they be able to attract that business back when they had finally managed to get to the other side of this mess?

  Pereira did not take any pleasure in the knowledge that they were there to effectively execute a death sentence upon the business, and she looked with regret over the small workforce, all wearing white overalls, white hats and goggles.

  “All these people will lose their jobs,” said Whittaker, as though feeding off Pereira’s thoughts.

  “There’s a least one person down there to whom you owe no loyalty,” said Pereira.

  This seemed to take a moment to filter through, then Whittaker turned, surprised, and said, “What? You don’t think one of … I mean,” and she shook her head, and looked back at her workforce. “We haven’t employed anyone new here in over a year. They’re a happy workforce.”

  “Maybe they are,” said Pereira, “but the chances that someone managed to distribute themselves into various mincing and cutting machines as a way to commit suicide are pretty slim. Someone fed body parts into most of your kit,
Mrs. Whittaker, and we’re looking down at the likely candidates.”

  “I just …” she began, and then didn’t seem to know where to go with the sentence.

  “How else could the body have got in here?” asked Pereira. “Could someone have broken in?”

  Whittaker shook her head. “We have the best security,” she said.

  “You can’t have it both ways. Either one of your staff is responsible, or someone sneaked in from outside and fed Kevin Moyes’s body to the machines.”

  Fed his body to the machines, thought Bain. What a great way to put it, and he immediately imagined the machines as pet hounds, waiting eagerly for food.

  “Yes,” said Whittaker, and her head dropped a little.

  She had looked so sure of herself, thought Pereira, but she clearly hadn’t been facing up to the truth. She must have known what was coming, but she’d obviously parked it in an out-of-the-way place until the police had actually arrived.

  Pereira looked at her watch, and then made a movement to indicate the sweep of the shop floor.

  “It’s time, I’m afraid. The people from the FSA are going to be here in ten minutes, our SOCOs should be here shortly afterwards. You need to shut everything down, you need to cancel all out-going deliveries, you need to recall all the meat you’ve sent out in the last two weeks, you need to get the staff together so that we can explain the situation, and then we’re going to have to interview each of them individually. I suggest you then send them home, because there’s not going to be much for them to do and they’ll only get in the way. Are there any members of staff not here?”

  Slowly, as Pereira had talked, Whittaker had taken on a look of shellshock, as she faced up to the impending apocalypse that would rip through her business.

  “I’ll have to think,” she said.

  “Well, here we are,” said Pereira, “we’re standing here and we’re thinking. All of us. How’s it looking, Mrs. Whittaker?”

  “I … I’ll need to check with Simon, the floor manager. There might have been someone off sick for a few days, I’m not sure. The office staff, yes, the office staff are working today. Not that there are many of us.”