Fatlands (27 page)

It took him a while to work it out, but when he did, it appeared to cause him enormous mirth. He laughed out loud. ‘My. You do have a high opinion of yourself. Don't worry, I'm not going to fuck you. You're not my type.'

Not just death but sexual rejection. As days go this was proving one of the toughest. So it wasn't sex. In which case what kind of desire had I been reading in his greedy looks? Come on, Hannah. Your only chance is to know him better than he knows you. And you don't have a lot of time. Not his type. Too old, perhaps?

Then it dawned on me. ‘But
she
was, wasn't she? Your type, I mean,' I said softly.

He frowned. ‘Mattie?' And something in the way he said it made me realize I had touched a chord. ‘Yes, Mattie was lovely,' he said. It took my breath away. Not just because it was true, but because it was clear that whatever his pact with the devil, there had been a bit of him that had not wanted to kill her. I had been right, but for the wrong reasons. That one had been Ellroy's decision. And that was what Joe had been trying to tell me in the pig shed when Ellroy stopped him. Another time it would have been the stuff to drive a wedge between them. But it was severely too late for that kind of subtlety.

‘You're killing the wrong person, Joe. I liked her, too.' But there was the tiniest crack in my voice and I knew I had lost. ‘For her sake let me go.'

He looked at me, and I watched something spark in his eyes. Mattie slid away, rubbed out by a stronger, wilder emotion. I didn't totally understand it at first, so clung on to what we'd had. ‘Do you want me to plead?' I whispered so that my self-respect wouldn't have to hear it this time. And then came the smile. Big and with an inner light. Its craziness scared me. He knew it immediately, and he liked that even more. He took a step towards me.

‘You're frightened,' he said quietly, almost tenderly, and it was not a question.

This time I didn't speak, just nodded. I watched his tongue touch the edge of his lips, then withdraw inwards: a preparation for a different kind of eroticism. What was
Frank's phrase? ‘Different strokes … ' Gotcha, loverboy. What he wanted from me wasn't sex but something else. Something I wanted to give him even less. The pleasure of my terror. Except some of it had leaked out already. A part of me was already lying in that road again, paralysed by the prospect of pain and the knowledge that it was in his power to infl ict it on me. My fear, his desire. So our conjunction of souls did have some purpose, after all. I tell you, I've always wondered about masochism. Hasn't everyone? Show me a woman who hasn't had even a brief private flirtation with the story of O, or a secret yearning for some dark corners of porn. The defeat of political correctness by the power of fantasy. But we're talking consenting adults there. Control being something that you choose to give up in expectation of the pleasure it will bring you. Not like now. Now the deal was different. But maybe not. Maybe this could still be my choice. I went inside and touched the fear. My body hurt from the effort of trying to keep it suppressed. I looked into the vortex and stopped resisting.

As intellectual decisions go it was a pretty visceral one. I started to cry, not normal tears, but great solid wedges of sobs that choked and made breathing difficult. I heard myself clutching for air, my arms and legs shaking uncontrollably. Like sex. A woman moving towards the outer orbit of control.

He saw it and thought it good. Through a veil of tears and mucus I watched him move towards me, starting to relax, getting into his own rhythm. Sex and death. Everything you wanted to know but never quite got in a Woody Allen movie.

‘Please,' I said, and my voice shook like a woman on the edge of orgasm. I was fast against the wall now. The stun gun was about three or four feet away, idling on its hook, looking for work. I saw him glance at it and I
knew what he was going to do. ‘Don't hurt me.' He moved to the wall and threw a large switch. The place hummed into life. The chain of hooks juddered and creaked as the conveyor belt started its dance. Then he picked the tongs out of the water and switched them on. The cacophony of sound was extraordinary. Dentists' chairs and Baron de Retz torture chambers. The noise of death whooshed down the corridor that connected slaughterhouse to pig shed and through the doors. The animals bellowed and smashed against the wood in a collective frenzy of fear.

He was a few feet away from me. I fell to the floor, curling my body in on itself. I knew what I was doing now. Knew it from the country road when he had lifted me up from the ground before hitting me again, and from the moment in the hotel when he had been itching to put a hand out to touch the scar. A final part of the ritual of violence, the moment of intimacy before he hurt me.

He was standing over me watching me cry. I got to my knees and gave a long, low moan. Faking it. Who says it's an unacceptable female strategy? He started to bend down towards me, laying the tongs on the floor near by. They gyrated crazily, the noise made worse by the clang of the concrete underneath. But he was too absorbed in the object of his desire to notice. As his hand came out to me I let him take hold of my face and gently move it up towards his, while I in turn slid my hand across the floor towards him.

And I knew, more than I have ever known anything before, that right at that moment I had as much power as he did. All I had to do was connect with it and turn it into violence. His touch made me shiver. I let the thrill of the moment wash through me. And in doing so I took him somewhere he wanted to go so badly that just for that second he dropped his guard. Behind us the noise of the pigs
was deafening, punctuated by the crash of their bodies against the wood.

I formed the word ‘Joe' on my lips like a kiss in the dark. He leant down towards me to hear it better and when he was close enough I closed my fingers around the stun gun handle and flung myself up and into his arms. I kept the tongs low and open, and as our bodies fused I rammed them into his groin, crushing the handles between my fingers with all the strength I could muster.

His roar of pain was more animal than human. Now it was his turn to hit the floor, doubled up with the voltage of love. I saw myself in a dark country lane with my stomach coming up through my throat. And I felt this river rush of energy. I lifted my foot to kick him, to keep him down, but as fast as the rush came it went and the compulsion turned to revulsion. I turned.

He was between me and the plastic doors so I had only one way to run. I wrenched open the grille gate and started to stumble down the corridor. But as I did so he shot out a hand and grabbed my foot. I think I must have screamed. I know someone did. This time I completed the kick. It caught him on the side of his chin. Not hard, but enough for him to let go. He was still having trouble moving. But I couldn't be sure it would last. It wasn't over between us yet. I knew that. I also knew whatever happened next it would never be over. Not really. All I could do was put an end to the now.

In front of me the doors to the shed were starting to splinter open under the frenzied weight of the animals behind. I walked towards them. Right at that moment I have no memory of what I thought. And maybe even if I had I wouldn't tell you. All I know is what I did. I bent down and unbolted the bottom of the sliding doors, two massive steel bolts. Then I reached up and did the same at the top. Immediately the doors started to rip open under
my grip. There was a catch in the ceiling a few yards away, where you could secure the doors to form a smaller opening, controlling the flow. Given the force of their bodies, I would never have been able to secure it anyway. The fact is I didn't try. I flung myself up on to the top of one of the concrete walls of the corridor as the doors smashed apart and the pigs stampeded in, a solid bulwark of meat on sharp hooves, mad with the sounds and smells of death and the size of their own bodies.

He was right in the middle of their path. I had no option but to watch, as he tried to pull himself up on the shit-stained floor and then as he went under, the pigs smashing forward, crushing the tongs underfoot and stampeding through the plastic doors into the open hall of death. I don't remember feeling anything. Except perhaps a sense of release that something held in was now set free. But whether or not that was me or the pigs I couldn't tell you.

After, when they had passed (or maybe when I had seen enough), I jumped down from the wall and walked out through the doors into the shed. The corral was empty. I stood for a while looking back into the mouth of hell. But time was at my heels. A firework display had been planned for tonight, and if I was not to be part of it, I needed to reach spectator distance. Poor pigs. From the fat of the land into the fire.

I walked towards the main door of the shed, stopping to unlock the pens where there were any remaining animals. They rushed out into the darkness after me. Then I walked across the grass and along the tarmac road towards the lights of the main office block.

I was maybe fifty yards away from the shed when the explosion hit. I had not expected it to come so soon. Time, of course, suspends itself at moments of crisis, but even so there was no way our dance towards death had
lasted a full three-quarters of an hour. Clever old Ellroy. Thinking of everything. So Joe had been a dead man from the start. In time to come that may give me some comfort in the confessional. But then I just kept on walking. I felt the heat of the flames at my back but didn't turn. I had seen it all before, marvelled at the fireball of light and noise, felt its power, been left with the fragments of life that haunted my nightmares.

The sirens joined the roar of the flames, and security guards poured out from the cracks in the darkness. I had reached the office block. I could see the lights in the penthouse where the movers and shakers of the food industry had been tasting pigs. Some were already on their way out, wine glasses and canapé s still clutched in anxious fingers. But in front of them all came Ellroy, a man used to making the running.

It took time for him to recognize me. Maybe I looked different. I don't know. But when he did, his face went blank and lost. Fear. Even from this distance I felt it seeping out from him. And I too liked the smell of it.

He quickened his pace. By the time he reached me he was way ahead of the others. Just him and me at the centre of the plot. The place every private eye longs to be. I grinned at him. And I must have looked mad, because that was what I saw in his eyes.

‘You got a lot of problems, Ellroy,' I heard myself say.

‘Where is he?' he muttered in a harsh whisper.

‘Where you always intended him to be,' I said gaily, a smile still on my face.

He grabbed hold of my upper arm. ‘Listen to me,' he said in a snarl. ‘If he's gone, then you just wiped out your only evidence. Shepherd's dead, which means his report was never written. And we've got a library full of positive tests and government approval.'

‘You've also got Clapton. And believe me, he's not the heroic type,' I said quietly.

And this time it was his turn to smile. ‘Stress,' he said. ‘It's a killer.' He shook his head, slowly. ‘Think about it, Hannah. All you have is the body of a known infiltrator and animal rights terrorist. Everything else is just your word, a hysterical detective who got too caught up in her own grief. And who's still going to have to explain what the hell she was doing in there with him in the first place.'

Thinking on his feet. What he was good at. And, of course, I knew he was right. In the end it's rather reassuring that the best bad guys have the kind of minds that make you wish they were on your side, fast, complex and sure. We had run out of time. The security guards were upon us. So were the guests. And the pigs. Most of all the pigs—poor sad, mad animals careering like lost souls around the compound. I took my cue from them. Tell the truth, but not the whole truth. Get what you can and let the devil take the consequences.

I turned to the crowd. ‘There was someone in the abattoir,' I said. My voice was loud and steady and not without righteousness. ‘I think he was animal rights. But the pigs killed him. I saw it happen. They just went crazy. There's something wrong with them. They've got some disease.'

The words echoed up into the night and a terrible ripple went through the assembled company. I looked straight at Ellroy. I didn't need to tell him what the deal was. He already knew. I'd cover up his cover-up, if he revealed the truth about the pigs. My silence for his words. ‘It's only money,' I said quietly. ‘You can always make more.'

He lifted his head and closed his eyes for a second. And I knew we had a deal. He turned to the public relations man at his shoulder. ‘Hannah says something's wrong
with the pigs,' he said slowly. ‘You better get everybody out. And call the Ministry.' I shook his hand off my arm. Then I turned and started to walk towards the main gate. And I tell you, it was the best exit I have ever made.

Y
ou wanted one anyway, go on, admit it. I mean stories need pay-offs, especially ones that end in such an orgy of action. Too much emotion, too little thought. It leaves you churned up. Like electricity looking to earth itself, everyone benefits from a way of winding down.

What more do you need to know? Well, you would have found the day spent in Ipswich Coroner's Court interesting. The case of Joseph Petrie, twenty-seven, of no fixed abode, whose body was found burnt and crushed to death in the ruins of the Vandamed abattoir.

A gift of a case, really. And one that tied up all the loose ends. Because as baddies go Petrie turned out to be something special. A real salmonella egg. Maringo's bomber jacket pal had been wrong (or maybe he just lied better than I thought). Petrie
had
once been involved with animal rights. But it had been a while ago and he was always more keen to disrupt the peace than save the animals. He had specialized in arson and violence but quickly got chucked out of the movement because he was so careless about where he chose to start his fires. From then on he was out for revenge … and fun. He got into Vandamed's good books by pulling the plug on a certain laboratory break-in eighteen months before. And from there—well, with his talents his uses to the company proved inexhaustible
Ellroy got him some new names, even something of a new face to judge from the police pictures, and the rest is history. History but not common knowledge, if you understand the difference.