Primal Cut (7 page)

‘That’s nice for you,’ he said continuing to read his book. As Garrod chewed, a piece of pig intestine fell from his sandwich onto the floor. Dexter wanted to retch. She saw that Garrod was eating ‘pig’s fry’, a dish once popular amongst the poor of the East End: fried pig entrails wrapped in bread.

Dexter noticed the dirty mincing machine behind the counter. ‘When was your last council inspection?’ she asked hoping to get a rise out of Garrod. She was pleased to see he suddenly stopped eating.

‘Eighteen months ago. The paperwork is in order. Do you want to see it?’

‘No.’

‘Why ask then?’

‘Did you know Brian Patterson?’ Dexter asked.

‘Never heard of him.’

Dexter eyeballed Garrod. ‘That surprises me. He worked at Smithfield.’

‘Lots of people work at Smithfield.’ Garrod smiled through his yellow-stained teeth.

‘He worked at the wholesale stall that you use. Are you absolutely sure that you don’t remember him?’

Bartholomew considered for a moment, weighing his options. ‘Hold on. Was he a big, tall bloke? Very muscular?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘Black straggly hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘The guy that got murdered?’

Dexter was tiring of Garrod’s ponderous questions. ‘So you did know him then?’

‘I have heard the name. I might have seen him at the market. It’s possible.’

‘Did you know that he lived near here?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Are you sure about that? It seems odd to me that a butcher who buys from Smithfield, and a Smithfield meat porter, two men that lived one hundred yards away from each other, never properly met.’

‘Life’s full of little coincidences, isn’t it?’

‘Not in my experience.’

‘Maybe you’re not very experienced. I could help you there. We could go out back. I’ll make your knees tremble.’

‘Don’t forget who I am, Mr Garrod,’ Dexter snarled, ‘or I’ll have the council down here in an hour to close you down.’

Garrod eyed her with quiet hate. There wasn’t much meat on her.

‘Am I a suspect then?’

‘Why would you think that?’

‘You’re here aren’t you?’

Dexter was running out of steam. Garrod was
right
in some ways; she did lack the experience of a proper copper: the wisdom of a McInally. However, she had other advantages.

‘What’s that book you’re reading?’ She pointed to the blue bound manual resting under Garrod’s monstrous left hand.

‘It’s called
A Handbook of Meat.
It was published by the Meat Trades Journal in 1929. It’s about the craft of butchering. My Dad swore by it.’

‘I thought you just hacked things up.’

‘Then you are showing your ignorance. Maybe you should read it.’ Garrod held the book out to her. ‘Bone up, so to speak.’

‘No thanks.’ Dexter could feel the interview losing momentum. She decided to lob a hand grenade into the conversation. She had picked her moment: wound up Garrod, made him angry and aggressive. Now she would watch him squirm. ‘Is your brother about?’

Bartholomew tensed visibly, his hand clenching around the book. ‘I don’t think he’s in.’

‘He is. I saw him out in your back yard before I came in. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can hear him singing now. If you can call that singing,’ Dexter said tartly, trying to spike Garrod into saying something he’d regret.

Garrod turned his head towards the noise: a half-shouted rendition of a familiar tune that was
emanating
from the back of his shop:

‘Oh me lads, you should’ve seen us gannin’

Passin’ folk along the road

‘
And all of them was standin’

‘That’s him,’ Bartholomew Garrod said eventually. ‘I’ll fetch him in.’ He turned and lumbered heavily out of the shop.

Dexter leant over the counter but couldn’t see past the bottom of the Garrods’ staircase. She picked up ‘A Handbook of Meat’ and flicked through. It was a manual for butchers. There were pictures of different kinds of cattle, pigs and sheep. There were pages of advice on equipment, slaughter methods, knives and grinding devices. On p317 was a diagram of a side of beef. It was entitled ‘Home Killed Beef – Primal Cuts’. The picture showed the most important meat areas on a beef carcass: the sirloin, silverside, tenderloin, chucks and others. The areas were marked with dotted lines: sirloin on the forelimbs, tenderloin on the hind legs, and silverside down the back.

Voices floated down the hallway; she closed the book and replaced it on the counter. The Garrods had returned.

‘Here’s the police lady, Ray,’ Bartholomew said, suddenly overcome with nervous politeness, ‘Miss Dexter. You answer her questions. Be a good lad now.’ Ray blinked uncertainly at Dexter.

‘Ray, did you know Brian Patterson?’ she asked. ‘He was a porter at Smithfield.’

Unsure, Ray turned to his brother. ‘Honnable lady, I didn’t know Mister Brian Patterson, the porter.’

‘What did he call me?’ Dexter asked.

Bartholomew put his hand on Ray’s shoulder. ‘He called you the honourable lady. Ray’s not very good with names. When he forgets them he gets himself angry, don’t you, mate? Our Dad had the idea of using terms like they use in Parliament. You know, honourable lady, honourable gentleman, and all that stuff. That way he doesn’t make himself upset or annoy anyone else.’

‘Has he got a mental problem?’ Dexter asked with deliberate tactlessness.

Bartholomew was struggling to keep calm. ‘He hasn’t got a mental problem. Our Dad used to keep motorbikes. He stripped the engines, refitted them and then flogged ’em. He’d do it in the house when it was raining. When Ray was a baby, our mum was carrying him down the stairs. She slipped on the carpet and Ray fell. He smashed his head on the engine casing of an old Triumph.’

‘Ah fell ten feet apparently,’ Ray nodded.

‘So he hasn’t got any mental problem, it just takes him a bit longer to get things.’

‘Ah ain’t got no mental problem,’ Ray shouted
angrily
. ‘Ah ain’t mental. Tell her, Bollamew.’

Dexter felt a mixture of fear and pity. She also felt something else: a bell was jangling in the back of her mind. She felt excited.

‘What was that song you were singing, Ray?’ she asked quietly.

‘What?’

‘The song you were singing just now. You were really good.’

‘Do you think so? Bollamew hates my singing. Don’t you, Bollamew?’

Bartholomew Garrod forced a smile. He didn’t take his eyes off Dexter. Her question had unsettled him: he couldn’t decipher its purpose. His fingers clenched around the handle of his favourite cutting knife behind the counter. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Ray.’

‘The honnable lady liked my singing, she said so.’

‘It was great, Ray. What was the song?’ Dexter pressed.

‘“Blaydon Races”,’ Ray said excitedly. ‘Shall I sing it again?’

Dexter’s heart raced as she realised that Ray Garrod might have inadvertently incriminated himself. She looked Bartholomew Garrod directly in the eye and smiled, ‘I don’t think so. But thank you very much. Thank you both for being so helpful. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’

The two brothers stood in silence as she left the
shop
. Bartholomew had been unnerved by Dexter’s strange line of questioning. Had he underestimated her? Why had she asked Ray about the song? Twice? She had really wanted to know. Garrod wracked his brains for an answer.

‘Where did you learn that song, Ray?’ he asked.

‘What song?’

‘The fucking “Blaydon Races”. The fucking song she was just asking you about.’

‘Don’t shout at me!’ Ray screamed covering his ears. ‘The honnable gennelman mustn’t shout at me. Dad said you mustn’t never shout at me.’

‘Was it Brian? You’ve got to tell.’ Bartholomew shook his brother violently. ‘Brian the porter, did he teach you the song?’

Ray nodded, tears running down his face.

Bartholomew Garrod smashed his fist on the meat counter. ‘Fuck! Fucking hell, Ray! What have you done? You fucking stupid bastard.’ Shaking with rage, Bartholomew Garrod frantically tried to arrange his thoughts. Dexter had made the connection. He had seen that in her eyes. They had lied to her about not knowing Brian Patterson and she had clearly recognised that. The bitch would return with a search warrant. Bartholomew Garrod felt time slipping away from him.

They had to move quickly. ‘Ray, listen to me. We have got to go away now. We’re going up to the
caravan
. Remember the old caravan up by the sea?’

‘On holiday?’ Ray had stopped crying.

‘That’s right, mate. Holiday. Listen, I have to go out now. I have to go out and get some money. Do you understand me, Ray?’

‘Yes, Bollamew,’ Ray nodded.

‘Lock up the shop after me. Don’t let anyone in. No one comes through that door except me.’ Bartholomew pulled his overcoat off its hook at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m going up to the bank in the High Road. I’ll be half an hour. Wait here for me, Ray. Don’t let anyone in.’

‘Yes, Bollamew.’

Bartholomew Garrod slammed the door shut behind him and waited for Ray to fix the bolt after him. It was starting to rain. He walked as quickly as his heavy frame would allow.

Underwood sat glumly in his glass-walled office, trying to read the full post-mortem report on Leonard ‘Lefty’ Shaw. In his vainer moments, he had once liked to think of himself as a tragic hero: an essentially noble but flawed character. True he
had endured his moments of catharsis; his marriage had foundered and his sanity had nearly slipped away from him. Now he felt a curious sense of nothing: nothing except the dull ache that was growing inside him. It was a strange form of redemption: to salvage hope and sanity only to be consumed from within by some evil malignancy. Heroes didn’t get cancer. Ordinary people got cancer: it was an ordinary little disease; an ordinary little lump. It was mundane, tragic in its predictability. Underwood didn’t know whether to fight. Perhaps redemption would come for him in death. Or, he reasoned, perhaps it would come in a noble struggle against it. He wondered if the rest really was silence, and if so, whether silence was such a bad thing.

He turned his attention to the matter of Lefty Shaw’s inauspicious death.

Name: Leonard Arthur Shaw. Age: 38 years 2 months. Weight: 134 Kilos.

Underwood passed over Shaw’s other personal details with the recklessness of the jaded copper.

Time of death: Sunday 12
^th
October at approx 2 a.m. Cause of death: Damage to rear of head resulting in fractured skull and brain damage.

‘Foul play,’ thought Underwood. There was a time, earlier in his career and long before the arrival of Alison Dexter, when the prospect of a murder
investigation would have excited him. Now it was just something to do. He had lost his sense of revulsion, his sense of justice even. Underwood wondered when this transition had taken place; when this emotional shell had hardened around him. Perhaps there hadn’t been a moment of transition. Maybe time had ground him down like waves grind rocks into sand. That was a more frightening thought.

The surface of Shaw’s body was caked in dried sweat. Obviously, this suggests he undertook serious physical exertion before death. It should be noted that Shaw’s blood group was O negative. However, traces of AB negative blood were found on his hands, arms and face. My supposition is that Shaw was involved in some kind of fight before he died. This hypothesis is supported by the severe bruising to the victim’s ribcage.

Underwood sipped his coffee, drowning his anxiety in hot, brown water. He tried to focus his mind. His thought processes, always erratic, were at their most unreliable in the morning.

The victim’s right arm also shows an extremely unusual pattern of damage. A portion of flesh has been torn away and is missing. The victim appears to have had a tattoo of an eagle in the upper arm area. It is a common design. It appears that there was some crude attempt to remove it by force.

Underwood looked out of the grey window at the grey skies above his grey world. Why try to remove the tattoo? Did it reveal something about the killer’s identity? He looked up as Alison Dexter arrived in the next office to his. Underwood looked up at the office clock. It said 8.02. He wrote that piece of information down in the notebook in which he noted such details. Dexter sat down and flicked on her computer. Underwood studied her black hair and elegant neck intensely, with the hunger of desolation.

He continued to read Leach’s report:
The wound to the upper arm is, in itself, peculiar. The flesh is torn and ragged resembling the kind of damage inflicted by dangerous dogs. However, an enzyme analysis of the area revealed traces of human saliva on the flesh. This matched the AB negative blood traces found on the victim’s hands. The obvious conclusion is that Shaw’s assailant removed the flesh with his teeth.

A warning bell jangled in Underwood’s head. In the gloomy recesses of his mind, something was screaming at him. Edgy now, he read on:

The actual killing blows were struck with tremendous ferocity. Splinters of steel were lodged in the victim’s skin and hair. The cranium was fractured an inch above the nuchal crest, fatally piercing the brain itself in two places.

Something vague and indistinct bothered Underwood. A memory frantically gasping for life: like some prehistoric creature crawling out of the primordial soup.

The post-mortem evidence points to a rather obvious conclusion: Shaw was engaged in some form of physical violence immediately prior to his death. His assailant is of the AB negative blood group and, in addition to administering the fatal blows to Shaw with some kind of heavy steel instrument (hammer?), he bit a sizeable chunk of flesh from Shaw’s right arm. Without question, Shaw was dead before his body was dumped onto the railway track.