Abattoir Blues (33 page)

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.

Dalby was a roly-poly sort of fellow in a rough Swaledale jumper, with a ruddy complexion and a shock of grey hair. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I apologise the place is such a mess, but I don’t get a lot of visitors.’

Annie had wondered about that when she had parked in the visitors area. It certainly wasn’t very large, she had noticed. There were two orange plastic moulded chairs, and Annie and Doug sat on them. Dalby went behind his desk. Through the window, over his shoulder, Annie could see the moors rolling off into the grey distance. It was a calming view.

‘I’ve just been speaking with a DC Masterson,’ said Dalby. ‘Nice lady. Terrible business, this, though. One wonders where to begin.’

‘How large is this operation?’ Annie asked first, when Doug had taken out his notebook.

‘Stirwall’s is a large abattoir,’ Dalby replied, leaning back in his swivel chair and linking his hands behind his neck. ‘We employ about a hundred personnel, sometimes more when things are especially busy in autumn.’

The lambs, Annie thought.
The Silence of the Lambs
. ‘That’s a lot of people,’ she said.

‘We manage to keep busy. We’ve a good number of meat processors to supply. Not to mention butchers and supermarkets.’

‘As you’re aware,’ Annie went on, ‘we’re interested in an incident of theft that took place here around two years ago.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dalby, nodding gravely. ‘We did report the theft to the police at the time.’

‘What exactly were the circumstances?’

‘It was a penetrating bolt pistol. This model.’ He took a loose-leaf binder from his desk and flipped to a picture for her. It was exactly the same as the kind the forensics people said had killed Morgan Spencer.

‘Where was it kept?’

‘There’s a metal cabinet fixed to the wall down on the floor where we keep all our stun guns.’

‘Locked?’

‘Of course.’

‘Who has keys?’

‘Well, I do. The supervisors do. And the knockermen and slaughtermen, of course. I mean, to be honest, almost anyone down there can get to them if he wants.’

‘That sounds very secure.’

Dalby gave her a suspicious look. She knew her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. Nor was it appreciated. ‘It worked,’ he said. ‘We’ve only had the one theft in sixty years.’

‘It’s enough,’ said Annie, ‘if it was used to kill someone. A human being, I mean.’

Dalby narrowed his eyes and peered at her. He didn’t look so roly-poly any more. ‘You don’t approve of what we do, do you?’

‘Whether I approve or not is irrelevant.’

‘Right. Yes. I thought so. You’re one of them there vegan tree-huggers, aren’t you?’

Annie flushed. ‘Mr Dalby. Can we please get back to the matter in hand? The bolt gun.’

‘Right, the bolt gun. Well, as I said, it’s the penetrating kind.’ He leered. ‘Know what that means?’

Annie said nothing.

Doug Wilson looked up from his notes. ‘I wouldn’t use innuendos like that with the boss,’ he said. ‘She’s been known to get quite nasty.’

Dalby looked at Annie and swallowed. ‘Aye . . . well . . . We don’t use those much any more.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Annie. ‘You stopped using them because they can cause brain matter to enter the bloodstream, and these days people are all so worried about mad cow disease.’

‘My, my. You
have
done your homework. Anyway, we now rely mostly on the non-penetrating kind, which stuns the animal. It works without puncturing the skull.’

‘The one that killed our man put a hole in his head,’ said Annie.

‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it? It was a penetrating bolt gun. In some cases, even a non-penetrating gun can put a hole in a human’s skull, if it’s positioned correctly.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind. Back to the stolen pistol.’

‘Yes, well, as I said, we reported it stolen at the time. Nothing happened.’

‘I’m sure the officers followed up.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they did, but it would be a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, wouldn’t it, if you didn’t even know where to start.’

‘Could it just have been lost? Mislaid?’

‘We might be a bit sloppy on occasion, but we’re more careful than that. It was stolen.’

‘Did you have any suspects?’

‘No. Well, not technically, at any rate.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nobody saw anyone take it, and nobody knew anyone who had expressed an intent to take it. We don’t even know exactly how long it had been missing before the loss was discovered.’

‘You don’t check them often?’

‘Once in a while. Stocktaking.’

‘So it could have been missing for some time?’

‘Not more than a couple of weeks. After your boss called, I checked the files and discovered we had let two people go around that time, either of whom could have stolen the pistol. I’m not saying they did. That’s what I meant by “not technically”. For all I know, the person who did it could still be working here. But she said she was interested in disgruntled employees, perhaps with a grudge, and those two fit the bill.’

‘Thanks for doing that,’ said Annie. She meant it, and she could tell that Dalby knew she did. It seemed to embarrass him.

‘Well, we take this sort of thing seriously,’ he said.

‘She’s not my boss, by the way.’

‘What?’

‘The detective who called. She’s not my boss.’

Dalby glanced at Doug Wilson. ‘No, I should have gathered that much from him. You’re the boss. My mistake.’

‘No problem. So why did you fire those two people?’ Annie asked, feeling a bit silly. Was it really important enough to make a point of her rank with Dalby?

‘Why do you usually fire someone?’

‘There could be any number of reasons. In your business, I don’t know.’

‘My business is the same as any other. You fire people for incompetence, for stealing, for persistent absenteeism, for failing to follow correct procedures, for insubordination.’

‘OK. So what did those two do wrong?’

‘They weren’t connected at all. It was two separate incidents, a couple of weeks apart. The first one was a skinner, and I suppose you could say he was just too sensitive. He shouldn’t have been doing the job. This kind of work isn’t for the faint-hearted.’

‘Then how did he get it in the first place? I mean, don’t you have to have psychological tests to weed out psychos who get their jollies from killing? So you can employ them, that is.’

Doug Wilson gave Annie a horrified and chastising glance.

‘Sorry,’ she said, holding her hands up.

Dalby paused and spoke slowly. ‘All employers make mistakes sometimes,’ he said. ‘Even the police, I should imagine. It’s why we all have probationary periods.’

‘This worker didn’t make it past his probation?’

‘No. The official problem was absenteeism and drunkenness on the job.’

‘I imagine that would help in—’

‘Yes, the drink helped him. He couldn’t handle the job so he took to drink to dull his mind. But do you have the slightest idea how dangerous it is to be intoxicated around some of the equipment we have in here? And not only for the one who’s drunk.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Annie.

Dalby grunted. ‘Aye. It worked, to an extent. Sometimes he’d be so badly hungover he didn’t come to work for two days.’

‘So you fired him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wasn’t there any counselling or anything available?’

Dalby gave her a scathing look.

‘Can you give us his name and address?’ she asked.

‘Ulf Bengtsson. He was a Swede.’ Dalby read the address off a sheet of paper on his desk, and Doug Wilson wrote it down. ‘I don’t know if he’s still there – in fact, I very much doubt it,’ Dalby added. ‘But it’s the last address we have for him.’

‘Do you have any idea what’s become of him?’ Annie asked.

‘All I can say is I doubt he’s still working in the industry. Maybe he’s gone home to Sweden.’

‘Do you know of any other abattoirs that would have employed him after that?’

‘No. We certainly didn’t give him a reference, and he hadn’t yet earned his slaughterman’s licence.’

‘What about an unregulated abattoir?’

‘I’m not saying they don’t exist. They tend to be small operations, with just one production line, and I can’t see one taking in a drunk like Ulf. I mean, it was pretty much constant intoxication by the end. I can only hope he got professional help, or he’s probably dead by now.’

‘Can you tell us where any of these illegal abattoirs are?’

‘I don’t know of any around here. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I don’t know them. As you probably know, this industry is very strictly regulated, and since the various controversies, from mad cow to horsemeat and rotten meat in your frozen burgers, it would be even harder to get away with anything. No doubt people do it. No doubt they succeed. But to be off the radar you’d have to operate out of the way and keep a very low profile. They’re small operations, as I said. They supply some restaurants and hotels, unscrupulous butchers, the occasional old folks’ home.’

‘And the other man? What was his problem?’

‘Kieran Welles, with an “e”, like Orson. He was a different kettle of fish entirely.’

‘Tell us about him.’

‘Kieran was with us for some time. Eighteen months, in all. He was a good worker, not troubled by nerves or drink. He was a slaughterman, and he was versatile. Mostly he did knocking work. It was his job to use the bolt gun on the animals when they came through from the lairage. But you could put him just about anywhere on the line and he’d get the job done. A good slaughterman is hard to find.’

‘And what was
his
problem?’

‘He was a bit too keen, you might say.’

‘Too keen?’

‘Cruel.’

‘What?’

‘He was cruel to the animals. He kept it well hidden, but it came out often enough, and in the end we couldn’t tolerate his working here any more. I can tell by your expression that you think we’re all a bunch of callous bastards in this business, but we have our lines, and Welles crossed one.’

‘What do you mean cruel? What did he do that was worse than his job? I mean, it was his job to fire a bloody bolt pistol at their heads, right, penetrating or non. How much more cruel could he be?’

Dalby leaned forward on his desk. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I saw him stub a cigarette out in a pig’s eye once, just for the fun of it. He’d kick and punch the animals sometimes. Again, for fun. Sometimes he’d deliberately fail to stun them correctly, so they were still alive and conscious when they were hung up on the line.’