The Price of Butcher's Meat

2

Sergeant Wield had had a trying morning.

Peter Pascoe wasn’t running this investigation the way he’d expected. Normally they made an excellent team, their peculiar talents and skills dovetailing nicely, while the knowledge that they were working under the shadow cast by the Olympian bulk of Andy Dalziel acted as a bonding agent that drew them even closer together.

Pascoe’s reaction to Dalziel’s close encounter with death had taken him down roads where Wield had been reluctant to follow, but once the Fat Man had started to recover, it seemed that normal service was being resumed. The obsessional behavior that had marked Pascoe’s pursuit of the truth about the explosion had pretty well vanished, and a period of relatively conventional work for Mid-Yorkshire CID had allowed everyone to settle back into their well-oiled grooves. Even the gap left by the Fat Man had begun to gape less widely.

Then had come the summons to Sandytown.

Pascoe’s late arrival had allowed Wield to get things set up in a way that would normally have won him nothing but praise and gratitude. Fair do’s, there had been expressions of both. But there’d also been a sense of something held back, of I know I can’t complain because I got here late, but if I had got here earlier I’d have done this differently.

The scattering of the witnesses had occurred before Wield’s arrival, but he felt that to some extent Pascoe held him responsible. At the same time, the DCI managed to suggest that his attitude to those who had remained-especially Edward Denham-would have been much firmer. For one thing, he clearly hadn’t much liked the locating of the incident room in the flat above the stables.

His attitude to Andy Dalziel’s presence was also an area that gave Wield concern. Dealing with the Fat Man was never going to be easy, but in Wield’s view, the only way to do it was by the book.

At the present time, Dalziel was in a nonoperational state. You paid him all the formal respect due to his rank, you might even have an off-the-record chat with him from time to time about how things were going, but you shouldn’t let him get within sniffing distance of an official function. Precisely how he’d managed to hijack Pascoe on his visit to the Avalon the previous night Wield did not know. Okay, some useful information had come out of it, but with that extracted, Pascoe should have drawn a line and said, From now on in, don’t cross it. When Dalziel turned up at the briefing, he should have been asked to wait somewhere else. And when he volunteered to interview Feldenhammer and Nurse Sheldon, Pascoe should have told him thanks, but definitely no thanks. At the very least he should have received a firm warning about using that fancy little recorder during the interviews. How the hell did the Last of the Luddites get his hands on something like that? Wield asked himself. And he shuddered to think of the legal standing of such recordings, made without the knowledge or permission of the recordees. Perhaps his brief period working with the Combined Antiterrorism Unit had blurred too many edges for Pascoe. When Wield had hesitated support for Pascoe’s ruse of getting Novello to leave an open phone in the car with Godley and Heywood, the DCI had smiled rather condescendingly and said, “If it works, Wieldy, great. If it doesn’t, who gives a toss?”

In the event, it had worked. But only at the expense of really alienating Charley Heywood, already seriously pissed at what she regarded as misuse of her e-mail correspondence with her sister, and even provoking the hitherto mild and subdued Gordon Godley into demands for his solicitor. Pascoe had used a carrot and a stick to restore his former docility, the stick being the threat of a charge of obstruction for concealing his relationship to Miss Lee, the carrot the promise that future cooperation should mean his half-sister’s background did not have to become public knowledge.

Wield later expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a promise if the CPS decided Miss Lee had laid herself open to charges of obtaining money by false pretenses. Pascoe had laughed and said, “Come on, Wieldy! Either curing people by sticking needles into them is always false pretenses, or it’s not. Sticking needles into someone and killing them is murder and that’s all we need to be thinking about.”

The way Pascoe was dealing with the woman from Seaview Terrace was another cause for concern to Wield. By the time they finished with Godley, Mrs. Griffiths had been sitting around for the best part of an hour. Seymour had found her all packed up and ready to leave. Cleverly he’d insisted on bringing the luggage along, for security, he assured her. What it meant was it now had the same status as a handbag and was thus much easier to search than if it had remained in the house, in which case they’d have needed a fully sworn warrant.

Of course a personal search would require a significant change of status. At the moment she was there as a voluntary potential witness. Keeping her hanging around this long was a dangerous strategy. If she took it into her head to insist on leaving, only arrest could keep her there. But Pascoe still didn’t seem in any hurry. He’d opened a file that Wield recognized. There’d been no opportunity in the immediate aftermath of Ollie Hollis’s murder for the sergeant to write up his account of his interview with Franny Roote. He’d done it before he got his head down for the few hours’ sleep he’d managed last night. And he’d presented it along with Roote’s own statement to Pascoe first thing this morning.

Now, seeing the DCI so rapt in his reading, Wield saw his chance to restore an equilibrium he felt was in danger of being lost.

He said, “Tell you what, Peter, you’ll be wanting to see Roote yourself sometime. Why not shoot across there now and get it out of the way? I’ll deal with Griffiths, put her in the frame or out of it. If in, she’ll still be here when you get back. If out, then you’ve missed nowt.”

Pascoe raised his bright blue eyes and looked at his sergeant. For a moment Wield felt as if that unblinking gaze was tracking every last convolution of his thought. In the past, only Dalziel had ever managed to make him feel like this.

Then Pascoe grinned and said, “Think I’ll faint if she takes her glass eye out, is that it, Wieldy? You may be right. And I must admit I am starting to find it irritating the way my thoughts always drift back to Franny.”

“I honestly don’t see how he can be involved in any of this,” said Wield.

“Me neither, but I do need to check it out myself. And I want to see him anyway. Okay. She’s all yours.”

It had been that easy. Perhaps the distraction of Roote’s reappearance had been at the bottom of Pascoe’s slightly eccentric conduct of things so far. Time would tell.

He waited till he’d seen Pascoe drive away, then he said, “Right, Dennis, let’s go chat to Mrs. Griffiths.”

Wield’s strength as an interviewer was his face. It was as unreadable as a brick wall. Except, as Dalziel put it, a brick wall was a lot prettier. Abuse, accusation, dramatic revelation, subtle legal argument, full confession, passionate denial, all bounced off that unchanging visage. Silence was no weapon because he could return silence till it became a howling chorus. He never used verbal menace. His favorite strategy was to invite interviewees to talk about themselves, then concentrate on what they left out.

The moment he took his seat in front of Sandy Griffiths, he knew this wasn’t going to work.

She was reading a magazine called Animal Rights. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend HEY HEY BMA HOW MANY RATS HAVE YOU TORTURED TODAY? And on the table in front of her was a bunch of keys that he didn’t doubt included the key to her suitcase.

Seymour started the recording machine and spoke the introductory ritual.

Wield said, “Rats?”

“Better with sweet cuddly kittens, you think? Our arguments are ethical, not sentimental, Sergeant. Rats have rights too.”

“Rights in defense of which you’ve broken the law on-how many is it? — five occasions, I think.”

“Lot more than that, but five where it came to prosecution. Six, if you include my very first demo here in Sandytown, back when I was a young girl. Except of course it wasn’t me who got prosecuted that time, but Lady Denham.”

He’d been right. She wasn’t going to leave him any aces in the hole.

He said, “Tell me about that.”

“I was spraying this antiscent stuff onto the hounds’ noses. She took a swipe at me with her riding crop, laid my face open along the cheekbone and over the right eye. She said I was aiming the spray at her horse and she was just trying to knock it out of my hand, but the horse reared in fear as she swung, so the crop caught my face by mistake.”

“But that wasn’t true?”

“Why would I want to spray a horse? They don’t scent the fox out! No, she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“And she was found guilty?”

“Sight of me in the witness box with twenty-seven stitches and my face like an explosion in a paint factory did the trick. That sentimentality I was talking about.”

“Did you feel the sentence was severe enough?”

“For assault on me?” She shrugged. “Couple of weeks in a dirty cell would have been nearer the mark, but at least it was a conviction.

For the more serious crime of inflicting pain on innocent animals she should have gone down for life.”

“But she wasn’t accused of that.”

“Not by you lot, she wasn’t.”

“Meaning there’s some other tribunal in which she may have been accused, tried, and condemned?”

“Depends if you’re a religious man, Sergeant.”

“I were talking this life, not the next. So, as far as the actual assault on you went, you felt justice had been done, more or less?”

“I suppose.”

“Despite the fact that you later lost the use of your eye?”

“No connection, the doctors said.”

“These same doctors whose knowledge is based on cruelty to rats?” he said, glancing at her T-shirt.

“They’re the ones.”

“But you didn’t agree, I presume, else you wouldn’t have wanted to sue Lady Denham in the first place?”

She smiled and said, “No, not my idea at all. A lawyer in our group-we get all kinds, Sergeant; I’ve even known some policemen who were sympathetic-this lawyer saw a chance for some publicity, good for us, bad for the huntin’ and shootin’ fraternity. But when they couldn’t find a medical expert willing to connect the assault and the loss of sight, they had to give it up.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“Relieved. I didn’t fancy going to court.”

“No? Doesn’t seem to have bothered you much those other five times.”

“I was there as a protester standing up for my beliefs, not a victim playing on a jury’s feelings.”

“So what are you doing in Sandytown, Mrs. Griffiths?”

“Holiday,” she said. “With my young nieces.”

“How young are they?”

“Late teens. Eighteen, nineteen.”

“Not so young then.”

“By comparison with you and me, Sergeant, mere children.”

“Brother’s kids? Or sister’s?”

For the first time he scored a hit.

“Sister’s,” she said after a hesitation.

“That would be sister in what kind of sense? Religious? Feminist?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Your file says you were an only child, Mrs. Griffiths.”

She smiled and nodded.

“So I was. Am. I should have said, sister-in-law’s. Sorry.”

That might check out. Probably not. Didn’t matter.

Wield said, “I gather one of your nieces hurt her leg and had to go home. Dog bite, was it?”

“A fall.”

“Dog bite, fall, I’m sure she could have been treated in Sandytown.”

“You know what young people are like. She felt she’d rather be at home in Leeds.”

“Less chance of attracting attention there than here, I suppose. Get treated for a dog bite here in Sandytown and I expect Sergeant Whitby would learn about it in a couple of hours.”

She didn’t reply, just smiled at him as if to say, Where’s this all leading?

He said, “Why did you choose Sandytown? Lots of unhappy memories.”

“It’s the coming place, Sergeant, haven’t you heard? The healthiest place on earth, according to the publicity handouts. If I stayed here long enough, who knows, I might even get the sight of my eye back!”

A bitter note. But bitter enough to lead to murder?

He said, “Had you ever been on the grounds of the hall before you went to the hog roast?”

“It’s possible,” she said. “I’m fond of walking. I may have strayed onto the grounds during one of my strolls.”

“Surely you’d have known?”

“Why? Like yourself, Sergeant, I’m a stranger here.”

Like an expert dancing partner, she was moving exactly in time with him.

He said, “How did you feel about Lady Denham?”

“Some distant personal resentment, naturally.”

“Enough to make you target her in your capacity as an animal rights activist?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “Her ownership of the Hollis pig business is enough to earn her that privilege without anything personal coming into it. Conditions on that site are a disgrace. I have some photographs in my case if you would like to see for yourself.”

There it was, an invitation to look in her case. Could be a double bluff, of course, in the hope of putting him off.

He said, “Thank you. Yes, we’d like to search your luggage, if you don’t mind.”

She pushed the key ring toward him.

“Be my guest.”

He didn’t touch the key but said, “Is there anything you’d like to add to the account you gave DC Seymour here of your attendance at the hog roast yesterday?”

She said, “Only that after a good night’s sleep, I woke this morning feeling I’d walked into someone else’s drama and the best thing for me to do was head off home.”

There was a tap at the door and Bowler stuck his head in and mouthed, “Got a mo, Sarge?”

“Interview suspended,” said Wield. “Dennis, why don’t you take a look through Mrs. Griffiths’s case while I’m gone?”

He stood up and went out of the room without even glancing at the woman.

He would have liked to think he was getting on top here, but the best an honest assessment could give him was a score draw so far. His gut feeling was that Lady Denham’s death had nothing to do with animal rights, but gut feelings weren’t for sergeants. His job was to advance cautiously through the darkness, step after blind step.

The old proverb popped into his mind-In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Make that woman and queen.