Trish swallowed a mouthful of hot saliva and told herself she was tough enough to witness a big impersonal killing factory if she had to.
‘But Smarden Meats is a good one, isn’t it?’ she asked hopefully.
‘As they go, yes. They provided OK pork for us, anyway. I mean, we weren’t going to pay for hand-reared Gloucestershire Old Spot premium-grade meat as the filling in a terrine.’
‘Not for pates. I can see that.’
‘Smarden have various grades,’ he went on, unaware of her struggles to control her heaving stomach.
He could have had no idea of the battles she’d had with food in the past. Whenever life had threatened to overtake her, or stress to turn from a spur into a straitjacket, she’d stopped eating. Looking back, she could see that at such times her intake of food was just about the only thing she could still control. She was long past that stage, but even now anxiety – or rage — could make it hard to swallow anything more than a fruit smoothie. It worried George, whose need for food rose in parallel with his stress level.
‘And we had to go quite far down in order to meet Furbishers’ price,’ Will was saying cheerfully. ‘We decided we could do that so long as we kept on with big, good-looking chunks of pheasant to make the layers.’
‘I’m sure,’ Trish said, trying not to look at a radiantly gleaming cock pheasant that was stalking along in the neighbouring field. She didn’t know enough about country sports to know when shooting was likely to start, but she couldn’t imagine this bird lasting much longer.
‘I was always tempted to go that little bit lower and try MRM,’ Will said. ‘It would have doubled our profits.’
‘MRM? What’s that?’
He turned his head to stare at her. Keeping her gaze on the road ahead, she asked what was so surprising.
‘You must know. Mechanically recovered meat: a kind of slurry got from blasting the last shreds of raw flesh from a butchered carcass with high-pressure hoses.’
‘Oh, gross!’
‘It is. But it’s cheap, which is why it was always a temptation. I kept having to shave a bit off the cost of my stuff here and another bit there. We had to halve the number of pistachios at one stage, as well as lower the proportion of pheasant. But it still went like a bomb until Furbishers …’ He bit his lip.
‘You never did succumb to the temptation of MRM, though, did you?’ Trish asked, to distract him.
‘No. Filthy stuff. But we could have. It’s still legal to use it from pigs and chickens, so long as you include it on the label’s list of ingredients.’
Trish felt as though she were in a meat-products seminar as he told her about changing attitudes and legislation. The details didn’t interest her, but she was intrigued to see how well authority sat on Will, as he talked about a subject he knew backwards.
‘But who could bear to use it?’ she said when he’d told her everything he knew.
‘Funny you should ask that,’ he said airily enough to put her on alert. ‘Furbishers put it in their cheapest own-brand pates. And I happen to know they get their supplies from Smarden. If I could prove that the supply might be contaminated, I’d have something on Matthew Grant-Furbisher, which could be bloody useful if things don’t work out.’
Trish lifted her foot from the accelerator so that she wasn’t tempted to ram the car into the nearest hedge. She’d been feeling so protective of Will that the discovery of his secret agenda for this trip was like getting his fist in her face. What else hadn’t he told her?
When her fury was under some sort of control, she said, ‘Is that why we’re here? To get ammunition for some post-trial campaign you’re planning to run against Furbishers if they win the case?’
‘Not exactly.’ He managed to sound hurt, but shiftiness echoed in his voice too.
‘Then what? Another general assault on supermarkets’ meat-buying policies?’
‘Someone has to do it.’
Trish bit down hard on what she wanted to say about men who pretend to be pathetic and needy in order to trick you into
doing things for them you’d never have contemplated in any other circumstances.
‘But, honestly, that’s not the only reason why we’re here, Trish. We’ve come primarily to find out what’s killing your friend. I thought you wanted to know that as much as I do.’
She pressed down hard on the accelerator again. The hedges blurred in her peripheral vision. This trip was beginning to seem like a worse idea by the minute.
‘By the way,’ Will added. ‘I’ve told them at the abattoir that you’re advising me on starting up again in business. That seemed like the safest cover story. You’re not going to be cross with me, are you?’
‘Don’t play the wounded child,’ she said with a distinct snap. ‘It doesn’t suit you. I loathe being lied to – and about. You should have told me what you were up to when you asked me to come today.’
‘I thought you’d know. You’re so clever at working out what I mean when I get muddled that I—’
‘Oh, come on, Will. Don’t pretend to be a country bumpkin. You’re a businessman, not a cowhand,’ she said, adding to herself, even if you do own a slurry-coloured tweed suit and clumping great brown shoes.
He grunted. ‘I may have been once. Not any more. So many people have told me how hopeless I am that I can’t trust my judgement unless you’re there to support it, Trish. That’s why I needed you with me today.’
‘Well, we’re here now,’ she said coldly as they reached a big pair of open gates.
There was a discreet sign identifying the place as Smarden Meats, and plenty of security cameras trained on the forecourt. When she’d parked and locked the car, she looked straight at Will, hoping to see in his expression some clue about what he was really up to.
‘Don’t lie to me again. I don’t like it in anyone, and in you it
makes me nervous. Don’t forget I still have to argue the rest of your case in court. That’ll be harder than it needs to be if I can’t trust you. OK?’
He shuffled his feet, raising dust that blew up around their ankles. ‘I’m sorry, Trish. It’s just that I
needed
you today and I thought you wouldn’t come if …’ He let his voice tail off. She sent him a freezing glance and stalked towards the unimposing entrance of the abattoir.
Almost everyone they saw looked hostile. The only people who offered smiles were the officiating vets from the Meat Hygiene Service. They were there, Trish learned, to check the living animals for signs of disease, enforce the legislation that protected their welfare at slaughter, and inspect and health-mark the carcasses as fit for human consumption.
It seemed impossible that with so much supervision any contaminated meat could ever leave an abattoir of this kind to get into the sausages she and Caro had eaten. She stopped to ask one of the vets what would happen to the pig’s carcass he’d just refused to stamp.
‘It’s easier here than in many places,’ he said. ‘The managers almost never challenge our decisions, so we don’t have to go to the magistrates for a destruction order. This one will go into the condemned meat chiller until it can be destroyed by the abattoir staff under our supervision. Sometimes they go for pet food.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
He looked curiously at her, but turned back to his work without any of the dislike apparent in every gesture and every glance from the plant’s own staff. Mr Flyte, the manager who had eventually agreed to show them round, didn’t look as aggressive as the rest, but even he seemed twitchy.
Will had told Trish about the secrecy of every part of the meat trade, but she hadn’t expected this. They moved on through the abattoir to a completely different section, which dealt not with
the pigs she’d already seen, but bullocks. They were first stunned, then killed, skinned and eviscerated.
Trish wasn’t usually squeamish or sentimental about animals, but there were processes here she couldn’t force herself to watch. She knew the smells were going to remain with her for ever. It wasn’t just the blood, but also the half-digested food – and worse – that made the air almost impossible to breathe. She could see now how bacteria might be transferred from an animal’s digestive system to the muscle tissue that would provide food for humans, but she was still surprised at the idea that any of the watching vets could miss that sort of contamination.
In a strange way, the skinning was the worst of all, more terrible even than the killing. The sight of the hides being ripped down the bodies made her own skin prickle and sweat. And the tearing sound hurt. She knew she would never be able to describe what she’d seen and heard to anyone else.
‘And this,’ Mr Flyte said, pushing open a door for them, ‘is the boning room.’
Headless, skinned and gutted carcasses hung on hooks along one wall, while men dressed in blood-spattered white overalls and short white gumboots stripped out the spinal cords. Relieved the heads were off, Trish followed Mr Flyte to watch the easier sight of other men removing usable chunks of meat from the carcasses before the remnants were whisked off to a different area. Two long rows of steel tables held the smaller pieces, as skilled boners reduced them to the kind of joints familiar from high-street shops.
Trish would never forget the sound of knives hitting first bone then steel. There wasn’t as much blood here as there’d been in the room where the pork carcasses had been gutted. There, oceans of it had been washed away by hissing hoses as the edible offal had been separated from the rest, to be flung into deep once-white plastic tubs. Jess’s vegetarianism seemed the most rational life choice in the world.
‘Mind your backs,’ said a stentorian voice from behind them. Will moved too fast and knocked into a stocky man who was in the process of separating chunks of meat from a bullock’s foreleg.
The man whirled round, his wickedly sharp knife barely missing the left arm of his neighbour at the boning table and pointing straight at Will’s stomach. Trish gasped. If he’d been six inches closer, the knife would have gone in. She’d seen how easily it could slide through muscle and sinew.
‘You stupid c—’ The boner choked on the word, substituting: ‘Afternoon, Mr Flyte.’ His face was spotted with blood and little chunks of meat, but it wasn’t that which made Trish move even further back: it was the way his nostrils flared and his eyes bulged. After a tense moment he put the knife back on the table. She saw the scars on his hands and the strong, blunt fingers, and tried not to shudder.
To her relief, they moved on again and were soon watching nicely familiar joints of beef chugging along on a conveyor belt, monitored by a man in a pristine white coat and mesh hat. He even held a reassuring clipboard. Trish got her breath back and asked about the man with the knife in the boning room.
‘Bob Flesker?’ said Mr Flyte, nodding. ‘You mustn’t take that too seriously. He was just startled. It happens. He’s a good worker and he’s never hurt anyone.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Trish said, surprised at the casual way he’d offered his reassurance.
‘That’s not what I meant. There’s always a risk of fingers being cut in the boning room. It’s impossible to prevent it completely with the pace at which the men have to work. But Bob has never let his knife slip or stray in all the three years he’s been with us.’
‘He must be good,’ she said politely, fighting queasiness again.
‘He is, but then he’s had more experience than most,’ Flyte said.
‘His family had their own craft slaughterhouse for generations.’
‘What happened to it?’
There was a hint of a smile on Flyte’s face, as though something in the butcher’s past appealed to him. ‘Uneconomic these days, like most of the others of that size.’
‘Trish, I think we ought to be getting on,’ Will said, very brisk and stern.
She took the hint and kept the rest of her questions to herself, leaving Will to open the subject of Ivyleaf and their sausages. As she listened to him getting absolutely nowhere, she still couldn’t forget the sight of the razor-sharp knife pointing at his stomach. Or the sense of fury only just held in.
Emerging into the clean air outside was like being born again. The ordinary sounds of traffic and aeroplanes were as reassuring as the beat of the sea.
‘We need lunch,’ Will said, apparently unaffected by anything they had seen or heard. ‘There’s a really good pub I know about ten miles away. OK?’
‘Sure.’ Trish felt sick, and her ears were still ringing with the screams and the sounds of tearing, the clang of metal on metal and the swish of gumboots through viscous liquid. She didn’t think she’d be able to eat again for a week, but she wanted to sit somewhere dark and comfortable for a while.
The sight of the gold-and-green countryside washed across her eyes, and she gradually let her hands quieten against the steering wheel. But when she’d parked behind a small old brick and tile inn and tried to get out of the car, she found her legs were shaky. She leaned against the car door for a moment, breathing in the medicinal smell of the cow parsley that laced the hedges, and getting her mind and stomach in order.
Later, consuming half a pint of classic bitter and even nibbling at a little cheese, in a pub as dark as she’d wanted, Trish found her brain working again.
‘You were amazingly cool with that bloke who nearly stabbed you. I was impressed.’
Will looked at her with an unreadable expression. She searched for the usual fear and anger and couldn’t find either.
‘Enough to forgive me?’ he asked.
For a moment she couldn’t think what he was talking about. Her own rage seemed to have belonged to someone else, as though she really had been born again.
‘Yes,’ she said, remembering now. ‘But don’t lie to me again.’
‘OK. Then I’d better tell you that I didn’t feel at all cool,’ he said, smiling like a boy caught out. ‘More like a rabbit in the headlights. And a terrible coward for not doing anything to protect you. I thought you might be cross about that too.’