'Positive. The abattoir supplies Thompson's Cash and Carry, and McFarlane's butcher shop.' 'Oh, we are so screwed!'
Midnight. Logan stopped on the damp concrete walkway and yawned, caught in the glare of a security spotlight. Drizzle made his SOC suit shine. The bone mill had been cleared out, the abattoir's butchery and packaging areas searched and sealed off, and all the senior officers had buggered off to their beds. Bastards. Logan stretched, groaned, and yawned again. Three disembodied sheep heads lay on the ground beside an empty skip, their creamy wool tinged with dark red. He knew how they felt. The shed where they aged the beef and lamb stood off to one side - a large refrigerated building full of vacuum-packed meat and shivering police officers. They'd been at it for four hours, and still didn't know if they'd found anything or not. 'Like pulling teeth.' The Police Search Advisor in charge of the shed team cupped his latex-gloved hands and blew into them. 'I mean, look at it ...' he indicated the rows of shelving, the green trays full of meat - dark purple in the fluorescent lighting - the black plastic latticework of the big storage bins. 'There's tons of the bloody stuff in here and it all looks the same to me.' It was Thompson's Cash and Carry all over again, only on a much larger scale. The POLSA turned and nodded at Doc Fraser. The old pathologist was huddled in a vast tartan blanket, examining shiny packages of dark meat. 'Poor sod's pushing sixty: should be sat on his backside drinking cocoa and fantasising about Doris Day in a bath full of jam, not buggering about in a bloody big fridge.' 'You better tell everyone to take a break in ...' Logan checked his watch. 'What, twenty minutes? Don't want them keeling over with hypothermia.' 'Any chance of a cuppa, or something?' 'They're opening the abattoir canteen for us - do everyone a hot meal, something with chips. It's--' 'Ah, no offence, like, but they sell human meat here. I'm no' eating anything.' Logan had to admit that he had a point. The second search team were working their way through the skin shed - four constables in grimy SOC suits - smeared with dirty-pink salt and globbets of fat - peeling the cattle skins from their piles one at a time, making sure nothing looked as if it belonged on a human body. Logan got an update from the officer in charge, commiserated with him about the stink, then got out of there as quickly as possible. But the skin shed was Santa's Grotto compared to the protein processing plant. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room, just off the bone mill, oppressively hot and humid. Logan gagged: the smell of greasy, rendering fat was nearly overpowering. For some bizarre reason a small, wooden garden shed sat against one wall, the windows fogged over with condensation and a film of tallow. Filthy pipes snaked through the air, leading in and out of three large black ovens that wouldn't have looked out of place in a horror movie. Team three were working their way through a trio of centrifuges, picking tiny chunks out of a hessian-wrapped disk the size of a tractor wheel. He'd been there less than thirty seconds, but Logan was already starting to sweat. 'How you getting on?' The female officer pulled off her facemask, pushed a limp strand of hair from her shiny face, and said,'Bloody dreadful, sir. Ovens've been off since about seven and it's still baking in here. And this,' she held up a handful of little lumps,'could be anything! Look at it! Bones, hooves, heads, blood, fat, it all gets passed through two sodding big sets of metal teeth till it's no bigger than the tip of your thumb. Then it gets stuffed in those boilers and cooked to death. It's just rubble!' She tossed her handful of animal-gravel into a big metal sieve.'And we're dying of thirst.'
