He put down Hangover Square and switched the music to his playlist of Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel songs, starting with the beautiful ‘If You Go Away.’ Banks liked Brel in the original; he couldn’t understand all the words, but even he, with his limited French, knew that there was a big difference between ‘If You Go Away’ and ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’. Where the English version was sad, the original was a desperate plea.
The playlist lasted him all the way to London.
Annie knew she’d been putting off the abattoir trawl, and after visiting four of the places she knew why. She had intended her objection to the assignment at the meeting partly as a joke, but she was fast coming to realise that there was nothing funny about it at all. She was getting heartily sick of abattoirs. Almost to the point of being physically sick on more than one occasion so far. The affront to her vegetarian sensibilities was almost more than she could take.
Fortunately, the previous day she had headed off to the east coast with Banks and so postponed the task, but on Friday morning she had no excuse. All she could to ameli-orate things was to drag poor Doug Wilson along with her. She thought he’d provide a little comfort and amusement, but so far he had provided neither. If anything, he had been more disgusted than she was at the things they had seen, heard and smelled. If she hadn’t been a vegetarian already, occasional lapses into fish and chicken aside, she decided, she would be one by now. Doug wasn’t one, himself, but Annie was starting to think that by the end of the day he might well be. If she were in the business of conversion, she knew now he was at his most vulnerable and it wouldn’t take much effort.
For the most part, they had managed to avoid the working areas and have their conversations in offices that didn’t smell of the rank horrors being committed on the killing floor. But you couldn’t escape the stench entirely, or the screaming or bleating of the terrified animals. Nobody could convince Annie that they didn’t know exactly what was coming. No matter how much you modernised an abattoir and tarted it up, it was still barbaric, in her opinion. You could paint the inside yellow and pin children’s drawings to the wall and it wouldn’t change a thing.
They were about to call it a day and head back to the station a bit early when Gerry Masterson rang Annie’s mobile.
‘Where are you?’ Gerry asked. ‘Where are you right now?’
‘Wensleydale,’ said Annie. ‘We’re just packing in for the day. Why?’
There was a pause at the end of the line. For a moment, Annie thought she’d lost the connection. It happened often out here. ‘Gerry?’ she said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Have you visited Stirwall’s yet?’
‘No. We’re saving them for tomorrow.’
‘You’re not so far away.’
‘No, but—’
‘I’m sorry to do this, guv, really I am, but I think you should go there now.’
‘Gerry, what’s going on? It’s been a crap day, to put it mildly.’
‘I know, I know. And I’m sorry. But I’ve been checking reports and speaking on the phone all day, and Stirwall’s reported a penetrating bolt pistol stolen about two years ago. We need more details.’
Annie swore under her breath. ‘Can’t you get them over the phone?’
‘It needs an official visit. There’s always something else comes up you’d never think of on the phone. Employee records, for example. Someone might have some names for us. Besides, you’re a senior officer on the case.’
Annie knew she was right. ‘OK, we’ll go now.’
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Forget it. Got a name for us?’
‘Ask for James Dalby. He’s the head supervisor, and he’s there waiting for you.’
As Annie turned the car round, Doug Wilson gave a heavy sigh.
‘What’s up, Dougal?’ she asked. ‘Hot date tonight?’
‘Something like that,’ said Wilson. ‘Actually, it’s my sister’s eighteenth birthday do. We’ve booked a table at that new steak restaurant in town.’
Annie looked at her watch. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll make it in plenty of time.’
‘Aye. Smelling like an abattoir, no doubt.’
‘Well, you’ll be eating steak for dinner, won’t you?’ said Annie with a sweet smile. ‘If what we’ve seen so far today hasn’t put you off, then why not watch a few more cows getting slaughtered first? Who knows, maybe you’ll even see your dinner before it’s dead.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Wilson, then he scowled and looked out of the window at the dark grey moors.
Soon the long squat shape of Stirwall’s loomed before them. There had been complaints that it had been built too close to the village nearby, and residents complained of the smell and noise at all hours of the day and night. But it was still there, still operating. Stirwall’s was one of the larger abattoirs in the area, too, with vans coming and going at all hours, stacks of boxes on pallets in the yard.
They parked in the area marked visitors and asked the first worker they saw where they could find James Dalby. He pointed to the front doors and told them to turn left up the stairs and they’d find Mr Dalby’s office on the first floor.
They thanked him and walked towards the open entrance. The outside of the building was surrounded with lairages, as one of the workers at the previous slaughterhouse had called them, holding-pens where the animals languished awaiting slaughter. At the moment, some of them were full of lowing cattle and others were being sluiced out according to health regulations before another batch was led in.
The smell got worse inside. And the noise. As each animal came individually through a chute from the lairage, its was rendered unconscious by a knockerman’s bolt gun, then strung up by its hind legs on a line. Three monorails of dead animals slowly moved down the length of the abattoir. At each stage of the way, slaughtermen performed their specialised tasks, such as slitting the throat for bleeding, spraying with boiling water to loosen the skin, then the actual skinning and disembowelling and careful removal of valuable organs, such as the liver, kidneys, pancreas and heart. The stench was awful. Annie tried to keep her eyes averted as she climbed the metal stairs to Dalby’s office, but it was impossible. There was something about ugly violent death that demanded one’s attention, so she looked, she watched, she saw. And heard: the discharge of the bolt guns, the buzz of the mechanical saws, and the change in pitch when they hit bone as the head was cut off and the animal split in half. It was almost unthinkable that someone had done this to Morgan Spencer.
Annie knocked on Dalby’s office door, and they were admitted just as a screeching noise far worse than fingernails on a blackboard rose up from the killing floor. Annie didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t want to know. She was glad to close the door behind her and find that the room was reasonably well soundproofed and that the air smelled fresh. No doubt Dalby’s exalted position had its perks. Annie had been worried that he would have been patrolling the floor in a white hat and coat keeping an eye on the workers, and that they would have had to walk by his side to interview him, keeping pace with the line, as they’d had to do at the previous place they visited. But he was the one who supervised the supervisors.